Suicide

[ Suicide ] [ Recent data ] [ Children and Young People ] [ Incarceration and deaths in custody ]

Suicide

On Wednesday 31 March 2010, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the 2008 Causes of Death data.  The suicide statistics on this webpage will be updated by Friday 16 April 2010 to reflect the new data.

For a summary of the updated 2008 data, refer to Recent Australian Data section on the media professionals website

• Suicide and self-harming behaviours were not part of traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, prior to contact with Europeans. However, recent data indicates that deaths by suicide account for a much higher proportion of all deaths among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than other Australian people.
• As with other data about health and wellbeing in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, it is difficult to know the true extent of suicide. This is partly due to the limitations of official methods of collecting data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and difficulties in estimating the size of the population in each age group. The available data on population estimates, hospitalisation and mortality rates are likely to be an underestimate.
• However, recent increases in the official rates of suicide and hospital admissions for self harm by Aboriginal young people has made the prevention, early intervention and clinical management of suicidal behaviour an issue of particular concern to Aboriginal people, communities and health professionals¹.
• Suicide is more concentrated in the earlier adult years for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than for other Australians. In recent years, the rate of suicide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males was highest in the 15 to 34 year age group. For Indigenous females, the rates have generally been highest in the 15 to 24 years age group.
• Death rates from suicide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males and females are over twice the rate for other Australian males and almost twice the rate for other Australian females.
• The suicide rate among older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians is low. However, as a smaller number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live to old age (ie over 65 years) it is not possible to draw conclusions from this.
• Research in the Northern Territory indicated that approximately 70% of Aboriginal males who died by suicide had features that may have been characteristic of mental illness prior to taking their life².
  
  Metal Health First Aid
  Guidelines for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples - Suicide

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Recent data

• The ABS releases data on the number of deaths by suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the states and territories of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The ABS does not publish data on suicide deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for Victoria, Tasmania and  the ACT due to both comparatively small numbers, and relatively low coverage of Aboriginal deaths in those areas.
• The data suggests that in 2007, there were 89 registered deaths by suicide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the five states and territories considered. This number of suicides accounted for 3.7% of all deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2007 in the selected states and territories. In contrast, suicide deaths in the same states and territories represented only 1.3% of deaths among Non-Indigenous Australians. Thus deaths by suicide account for a much higher proportion of all deaths among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than other Australian people.
• This same pattern was seen in 2006. In that year, there were 88 registered suicide deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the selected five states, with this number accounting for 4.3% of all deaths. The corresponding percentage for other Australian people was 1.3%.
• The difference between the proportion of deaths that was due to suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other Australian people varies by state and territory. The ABS data for 2007 suggests that the biggest difference can be observed for Queensland, where 4.7% of deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were due to suicide compared with 1.0% of deaths to other Australian people. In contrast, the smallest difference is seen for the New South Wales, where 2% of deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were due to suicide and a 1.2% of deaths of other Australian people were due to suicide.

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Children and Young People

• A 2005 survey in Western Australia looked at the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal children and young people aged 4 to 17 years³.The survey also looked at suicidal behaviour of Aboriginal young people and indicated that:
  • One in six young people aged 12 to 17 years (16%) had seriously thought about ending their life in the 12 months prior to the survey;
  • Of the young people who had seriously thought about ending their own life in the 12 month prior to the survey, 39% had attempted suicide in the same period;
  • A higher proportion of young people at high risk of clinically significant emotional or behavioural difficulties had seriously thought about ending their own life (37%) compared with young people at low risk (10%);
  • A higher proportion of young people with friends or people known to them who had recently attempted suicide had themselves seriously thought about ending their own life (35%) compared with young people without any acquaintances who had recently attempted suicide (11%).

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Incarceration and deaths in custody

• From 1990 to 1995, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were 16.5 times more likely than other Australians to die in custody.
• The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody investigated the deaths of 99 Aboriginal persons in police or prison custody, which occurred between January 1980 and May 1989. A large proportion of these deaths resulted from violence - either self-inflicted or resulting from the actions by custodians, prisoners or other people. The findings are available online at www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic.
• One of the outcomes of the Royal Commission was the establishment of a National Deaths in Custody Monitoring and Research Program at the Australian Institute of Criminology. Publications are available on-line at www.aic.gov.au/research/dic/publications.html.

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References

1 Zubrick, S. R., Silburn, S. R., Lawrence, D. M., Mitrou, F. G., Dalby, R. B., Blair, E. M., Griffin, J., Milroy, H., De Maio, J. A., Cox, A., and Li, J. (2005). The Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey: The social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal children and young people. Perth, WA: Curtin University of Technology and Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.
2 Parker, R. & Ben-Tovim, D. I. (2002). A study of factors affecting suicide in Aboriginal and 'other' populations in the Top End of the Northern Territory through an audit of coronial records. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36, 404-410.
3 Zubrick et al. (2005). op cit