Desperate Hunter mum refuses to give up search for her missing son

NEARLY 15 months may have passed, but Rosalie Ulrich still finds herself trawling the streets desperately looking for her missing son.

"I may go for a couple of weeks being all right and then I just find myself driving around and looking at everyone to see if it is him," Mrs Ulrich said.

"It never leaves you."

Colin Bell, a 38-year-old who suffered from schizophrenia since he was a teenager, vanished from the grounds of Morisset Hospital in May last year.

His parents and seven siblings still hold hope he is alive but unable to return home.

"We know we have got to face the fact that the police or whatever believe that he is probably not with us any more," Mrs Ulrich said.

"You are OK for a while but then the nightmares come back.

"We just hope that he is out there surviving somehow."

Mrs Ulrich said she held fears her son may be holed up somewhere, his illness stopping him communicating where he is or who he belongs to.

"It's the helplessness, the uselessness that you feel," she said.

A coronial inquest is set down for Friday - the final day of the National Missing Persons Week aimed at raising awareness of the issues and impacts involved in missing persons cases.

The awareness campaign starts tomorrow.

Some 35,000 people are reported missing across Australia each year, equating to one person every 15 minutes.

The focus this year is the theme "when someone goes missing, a day spent waiting is a day lost", to serve as a reminder that people do not need to wait 24 hours to report someone missing.

And there are 592 people listed as long-term missing in NSW. It includes Allan Vitnell, who went missing on November 3, 2004, after leaving his Cessnock home for a walk.

The 72-year-old, who had recently had heart bypass surgery and liked to go for long walks, never returned home.