Posted: September 7th, 2024

Suicide Prevention in Australia

Suicide Prevention in Australia
How Australia tries to stop people from killing themselves
The World Health Organization (WHO) says that suicide is the act of killing oneself on purpose. On average, one person commits suicide every 40 seconds, and about 800,000 people die from suicide each year around the world. Suicide is a worldwide problem, and published cases show that 79 percent of the time, it happens in countries with poor economies. But official data shows that there is also a big problem with people killing themselves in rich countries. AIHW (2020) says that there were 3,046 suicide deaths in Australia in 2018. From 2016 to 2018, suicide was the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 44. In the United States, there were 48,888 suicides that were recorded in 2018. (NIMH 2019).

Most people choose to end their lives by suicide after going through major problems, like losing their job or having mental health problems that change their sense of who they are. Beyond Blue (n.d.) says that there are early signs that can lead to suicidal behavior, and that recognizing these signs can help lower the high suicide rate in Australia. Also, addressing the main things that lead to suicide, like a person’s mental health, can help stop someone from trying to kill themselves in the first place. In this study, we will look at the different methods and interventions that have been used in Australia to prevent and lower the number of suicides.

Literature Review

Suicide is still one of the leading causes of death for people under the age of 25 in this day and age. Most people who kill themselves do so when they are in their teens. Hill et al. (2020) say that federal plans to prevent suicide recognize that young people have a higher risk of suicide and need different ways to stop them from doing it. During the study period, there were 3,027 suicides. Of those, 40.9% had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or psychotic disorders, 15.7% had other mental problems, 33.5% were drunk, 31.1% had hurt themselves before, and 28.2% had used drugs before. People from 10 to 24 years old took part in the study. Negative life events included a history of neglect or abuse, money problems, and the suicide death of a friend or family member.

Gili et al. (2019) say that comorbidities and mental disorders are strong predictors of suicide in young people. Both suicides and suicide attempts were linked to problems with mental health. Affective disorders and co-occurring disorders were big risk factors. In their meta-analysis of 24 studies with 25,354 people ages 12 to 26, the researchers found that the number of people with mental health problems was linked to both successful suicide and suicide attempts. Comorbidity is the cause of a bad diagnosis, higher treatment costs, high resource use, poor treatment compliance, and disability. All of these things are bad events and challenges that can lead to suicide (Gili et al., 2019). The authors came to the conclusion that improving the physical and mental health of young people in Australia should be a key goal in the fight against suicide. One of the most important things that can be done to stop people from killing themselves is to make sure that mental health services are well-funded.

In 2017, Australia had the highest overall suicide rate since 2007, and men were three times more likely to commit suicide than women (Martnez-Rives et al., 2021). Indigenous Australians had nearly double the suicide death rate of the rest of Australia’s population in the same year, and the average age at which an Indigenous Australian dies by suicide is younger than the average age at which an Australian dies by suicide (Martnez-Rives et al., 2021). Australia was one of the first countries to adopt a national strategic approach to suicide prevention, but the country has had a lot of trouble putting it into place because of. This is because it is important to think about the desirability, practicality, and severity of the most commonly used methods, like hanging, when coming up with ways to stop them (Robinson, 2016).

According to the Australian Department of Health, being well is more than just not being sick. It also includes the emotional, mental, physical, and social aspects of a person’s life. It is how a person feels about his or her own life and how he or she lives it. Based on this definition, unemployment is one of the most important things that can affect a person’s well-being. Milner et al. (2013) found that being unemployed was linked to a risk of suicide that was three times higher than that of people who had jobs.

Unemployment directly causes a bad thing to happen in a person’s life, which takes the form of more money problems. Stress and strain in one’s life can have an effect on one’s overall health and well-being, as well as cause mental health problems like anxiety and depression. In light of the current Corona Pandemic, which has caused more people to lose their jobs, Deady et al. (2020) say that programs like the labour market programme, sustainable welfare, proper financing, and access to health care can make it less likely for people to kill themselves. Countries that kept their social systems the same had lower suicide rates than countries that cut their spending on welfare. Welfare programs can help improve the overall health of unemployed people by making them feel less stressed about money.

It has also been shown that a person’s mental health, especially if it is not being taken care of, is a key factor in suicide, especially if it is not being treated. Several studies have found that people in Australia who are having problems with their mental health are more likely to run into problems when trying to get help for their mental health. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) says that anxiety and depression are the most common mental illnesses. However, only a third of the people who have these problems get help. Part of the problem is that Australians face problems and obstacles that make it hard for them to get health care (Corscadden et al., 2019). Some of these problems are disrespect in hospitals, rising costs of health care, long wait times for appointments, and treatment of comorbidities that doesn’t work. They also have to deal with the fact that they have to wait a long time for a doctor’s appointment. Even though anxiety and depression often happen together, most Australians get help for depression instead of anxiety because they know more about depression than they do about anxiety (Corscadden et al., 2019). It is a common way to explain anxiety by saying that it is caused by the stresses and strains of everyday life. Taking on these problems will lead to better results and a drop in the number of people with mental illnesses that lead to suicide.

There is also a link between suicide and some parts of society and culture. Money and Batterham’s (2019) study in Australia found that people’s attitudes toward suicidal people are affected by their race. The study’s results showed that people who were not of Anglo descent had a higher level of shame about suicide than those who were of Anglo descent. How much people from different ethnic groups knew about suicide was also very different. This suggests that the high number of non-Anglo people might be because they don’t know much about suicide. Eskin et al. (2011) also found results that match these. They found that people in some cultures feel worse about suicide than people in others. So, if we want to lower the suicide rate, we need to learn more about suicide. There are a lot of myths about suicide problems, and some of them might keep people who are struggling with suicidal thoughts from getting help. Creating a safe environment that is sensitive to the cultural norms of different groups of people can help reduce the social shame that comes with asking for help and boost literacy rates.

The Australian National Suicide Prevention Strategy focuses on the community as a unit for suicide prevention. This is done to help the public learn more about suicide and what causes it and to raise awareness of these issues. Also, the policy focuses on making it easier for families, people, and communities affected by suicidal behavior to get care and support. It does this by funding programs that help create or develop better support systems. The main goal of the approach is to help people become more resilient and give them the tools they need to take care of themselves.

Zalsman et al. (2016) looked at all of the published studies on how to stop people from killing themselves since 2005. They found that treatments for mental illness and programs to raise awareness in schools help cut down on the number of people who try to kill themselves. But the article came to the conclusion that there is no one method that is much better than the others. Research needs to be done on the many ways that evidence-based solutions can be put together to help both individuals and groups. Clifford et al. (2013) came to the same conclusion in their research, which is that there is not enough information from previously published studies to figure out which intervention measures are the most effective at reducing suicide among Indigenous peoples. The study says that governments, health care professionals, and Indigenous organizations should work together to look at different ways to prevent problems.

Increasing literacy, improving mental health care, reducing stigma, and making people feel better are all important ways to stop people from killing themselves. It is very important to dispel any myths about suicide and reduce the shame that comes with having suicidal thoughts by giving information about the subject. If more people knew how to recognize the warning signs of suicidal thoughts and how to talk to someone who is having suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and completed suicides could be stopped. Since there are so many teens who kill themselves, it’s important to focus on ways to make life better for young people as a kind of preventative measure. When all of these ways to stop suicide are used together, the number of people who kill themselves in Australia will go down, and eventually, there will be no need for suicide at all.

Conclusion

Literature points to the main causes of suicide and suggests ways to stop it, but there aren’t any studies that look at the opinions of professionals who work with suicidal people every day in Australia. There are a lot of things, from social to economic to psychological, that can make someone act suicidal. Professionals like social workers, mental health workers, healthcare workers, and community workers, among others, provide social services and interact with and help suicidal people as part of their jobs. These professionals are the ones who put suicide prevention measures into place, and they know how to figure out which strategies work best in which situations. The fact that suicide is still the leading cause of death in Australia shows that prevention measures are not working or are not being used well.

So, the problem is that there hasn’t been a wide-scale practical evaluation of ways to stop people from killing themselves. Researchers like Long et al. (2022) have looked at how well different programs, like the Lifespan suicide prevention intervention, work, but they haven’t asked the people who work with suicidal people every day what they think. Because social workers and health care workers work with people who are suicidal, they know from experience which strategies work and which do not. So, the goal of this study is to find out what these professionals think and what the best ways are to stop suicide in Australia.

References

AIHW (2020). Suicide and intentional self-harm – Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The Institute of Health and Welfare in Australia. The report can be found at https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/suicide-and-intentional-self-harm. It can be accessed on March 30, 2021.

Myths and facts about suicide in Beyond Blue. Beyondblue.org.au. From https://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/suicide-prevention/myths-and-facts. Accessed August 30, 2022.

Clifford, A. C., C. M. Doran, and K. (2013). A systematic look at the ways that Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand try to keep indigenous people from killing themselves. BMC public health, 13(1), pp. 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-463

Corscadden, L., Callander, E. J., & Topp, S. M. (2019). There are different ways that people with mental health problems can get health care in Australia. 619–627 in Australian Health Review, 43(6). https://doi.org/10.1071/AH17259

Deady, M., Tan, L., Kugenthiran, N., Collins, D., Christensen, H., and Harvey, S. B. (2020). Using the facts to plan for prevention of unemployment, suicide, and COVID-19. Australia’s journal of medicine. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50715

Eskin, M., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., & Altinyazar, V. (2011). A cross-cultural study of how and why medical students in Austria and Turkey act and think about suicide. 46(9):813-823 in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-010-0254-7

Gili, M., Castellví, P., Vives, M., de la Torre-Luque, A., Almenara, J., Blasco, M. J., … & Roca, M. (2019). (2019). A meta-analysis and systematic review of longitudinal studies looked at how mental disorders can make young people more likely to try to kill themselves. Journal of Affective Disorders, 245, pp. 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2018.10.115

Hill, N., Witt, K., Rajaram, G., McGorry, P., & Robinson, J. (2020). (2020). Young Australians who killed themselves between 2006 and 2015: a cross-sectional analysis of national coronial data. The Medical Journal of Australia, 214(3), 133–139. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50876

Long, J. C., Ruane, C., Ellis, L. A., Lake, R., Le Roux, A., Testa, L., … & Zurynski, Y. (2022). The LifeSpan suicide prevention initiative is a set of networks that aim to improve the social capital of communities in regional Australia in order to prevent suicide. International journal of mental health systems, 16(1), pp. 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13033-022-00524-z

Martínez-Rives, N. L., Dhungel, B., Martin, P., & Gilmour, S. (2021). Trends in suicide deaths among Australian men by method from 1978 to 2017. 18(9), 4557, in the International journal of environmental research and public health. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094557

Milner, A., Page, A., & LaMontagne, A. D. (2013). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the link between long-term unemployment and suicide. PloS one, 8(1), e51333. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051333

T. Money and P. Batterham (2019). Sociocultural factors in Australia that affect how people feel about suicide. Studies of Death, 45(3), 219–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1626943

NIMH (2019). Suicide Prevention. Nimh.nih.gov. From https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention/index.shtml on March 30, 2021.

Robinson, J. (2016). Raise the bar for preventing youth suicide. Melbourne, Down Under

WHO (2019). Suicide data. Who.int. From http://www.who.int/teams/mental-health-and-substance-use/suicide-data, on March 30, 2021.

Zalsman, G., Hawton, K., Wasserman, D., van Heeringen, K., Arensman, E., Sarchiapone, M., … & Zohar, J. (2016). Strategies for preventing suicide are looked at again after 10 years: a systematic review. The Lancet Psychiatry, Vol. 3, No. 7, p. 646–659. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30030-X

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