Nicole helps families find missing loved ones. They all have one thing in common.

56,000 people go missing in Australia every year.

That's 140 a day.

Most are found within a week, but at any one time there are 2,700 long-term missing people in this country.

Nicole Morris has dedicated her life to helping find them.

In 2005, she created the Australian Missing Person's register; the first resource of its kind on the internet to help families collate everything on their missing loved one.

Speaking to Mamamia's True Crime Conversations, Morris admitted something surprising she's discovered in her two decades helping find missing people.

Of the families with those missing long-term she admits, "almost 100 per cent" reach out to a psychic in their search for answers.

"Even people who are sceptical who have never been to a psychic, who don't like psychics," she said.

"There's even some deeply religious families who don't believe at all…but if someone comes to you and says, 'I just have a strong feeling that she might have gone in a green car,' that will stick in their minds, and they'll go 'maybe I should mention to the police that there was a green car.

"They will clutch at anything when you have nothing, any tiny thread of a lifeline people will clutch at."

As someone who watches this unfold time and time again from the sidelines, Nicole has mixed emotions about the psychic industry because, "I usually only get to see the bad side of things."

Like when a psychic reaches out to a grieving family and gives them a distressing vision they might have had.

"That's unforgivable, and in my experience 99.99 per cent of the time is absolutely inaccurate," she told True Crime Conversations.

Nicole recalls a time she had a woman whose daughter had gone missing over the weekend. A psychic contacted her and told her she'd been kidnapped, raped and killed, that both her hands and feet had been bound and she was in a shed by a lake.

"Then the daughter turned up fine," said Nicole. "But for those few hours that mother went to the worst place any parent can possibly go."

The only psychic that has given Nicole pause is Debbie Marshall, who is well known in Australia.

"She got things like smelling a particular perfume of a missing person that the brother recognised as hers," she said. "How would she know that? So I keep an open mind."

There are two other commonalities that the families of long-term missing people often share; vivid dreams and survivors' guilt.

"It's the brain trying to figure out what's happened," Nicole says of the dreams.

As for the guilt, families torture themselves with "what ifs" and question everything about what they did and didn't do.

"The way that I look at it is, I think that if something is going to happen, it's going to happen, and there's not always anything that anybody can do about it," Nicole told True Crime Conversations.

While most in Australia would know the name William Tyrell and remember the story of The Beaumont children, there are hundreds more cases that've been somewhat forgotten.

Like 15-year-old friends Kay Docherty and Toni Cavanagh who disappeared from a bus stop in Warilla, NSW, in 1979.

Or 20-year-old Jason Mazurek, who walked out of a casino in Hobart in 2002 never to be heard of again.

Or 33-year-old Marcia Ryan, who was last seen walking beside the Princes Highway in Victoria in 1996.

The families in these cases have all been left without answers — with the disappearances affecting their loved ones' lives forever.

Speaking to Jason's sister Jo in her book Vanished for example, Nicole writes that Jo thinks her brother's disappearance contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, gave her trust issues and made her extremely overprotective of her own children.

Kay's mother, Jean, quit her job to search for her daughter full time. Her son Kevin believes that heartbreak eventually killed her in 2014.

He continues to live in his childhood home all these decades later, in case Kay ever returns.

As Nicole tells True Crime Conversations, they call the grief of losing a missing person, "ambiguous loss," because you don't know why, who, where or how.

Nicole admits she often deals with the siblings of missing people the most.

"They were stronger and more able to talk to me about it," she told True Crime Conversations.

"The parents of missing persons were just so broken, that they often struggled to put it into words."

Feature image: Getty.