Nicole has spent decades helping families of missing people. There's one thing she sees every time.

56,000 people go missing in Australia every year.

That's 140 people a day.

Most are found within a week, but at any one time there are 2,500 long-term missing people in this country.

Nicole Morris has dedicated her life to helping find them.

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

Listen to Nicole Morris on True Crime Conversations. Post continues below.

Morris has noticed a recurring pattern over the two decades she's helped find missing people.

Of the families with those missing long-term, she said, "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 told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

"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."

Nicole Morris created the Australian Missing Persons register in 2005. Image: Supplied.

As someone who watches this unfold time and time again from the sidelines, Nicole has mixed emotions about the psychic industry.

"I usually only get to see the bad side of things," she said.

Bad 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 said.

Nicole recalled 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," Nicole said. "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 said, referring to 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 said.

When it comes to missing person cases, the high-profile tend to stick in the public's consciousness for years; most Australians know the name William Tyrell and can remember the story of The Beaumont children.

But hundreds of other cases have faded from public memory.

Such is the case, with 15-year-old friends Kay Docherty and Toni Cavanagh, who disappeared from a bus stop in Warilla, NSW, in 1979.

Watch: What we know about the disappearance of Kay and Toni. Post continues below.

Or 20-year-old Jason Mazurek, who walked out of a casino in Hobart in 2002 and was never heard from 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.

In her book Vanished, Nicole writes that Jason's sister Jo believes his disappearance played a role in the breakdown of her marriage, left her with lasting trust issues and made her deeply overprotective of her own children.

Kay Docherty and Toni Cavanagh went missing in 1979. Image: Australian Missing Person's Register.

Jason Mazurek was last seen in 2002. Image: Australian Missing Person's Register.

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.

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

"They were stronger and more able to talk to me about it," she said.

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

Feature image: Getty.