Australia’s suicide rate could be halved with European approach: researchers

Strategies that have helped to reduce suicide by 30 per cent in Europe could halve the number of Australians taking their lives if employed here, researchers say.

The National Coalition for Suicide Prevention is calling on all jurisdictions to fund a similar, nationwide pilot program in Australia.

Black Dog Institute director Professor Helen Christensen said the European program had attracted international attention, and the coalition was now focussed on bringing it to Australia.

“If we can pull together all community and health organisations to deliver evidence-based strategies at the same time, in the same location, then we have a good chance of reducing [suicide] rates in Australia by as much as 30 to 50 per cent, within four to five years,” she said.

“Suicide rates haven’t changed in the last 10 years in Australia, and just doing what we have always done is not really going to make any difference to those rates.

“It has been a scattergun approach and funding has been distributed in a non-organised way. Initiatives are very fragmented and some are run by the government and others by NGOs.”

Political will, community buy-in required

The most recent national data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that in 2013, 2,522 people died by suicide in Australia.

The National Coalition for Suicide Prevention includes the Black Dog Institute, Suicide Prevention Australia and more than 20 other partner organisations.

The Coalition want a pilot program to test eight suicide prevention strategies simultaneously, in urban, rural and remote community settings across Australia.

The strategy contains 12 components, including improved training for GPs and teachers, high-quality treatment for mental illness, and assertive outreach to people who present at emergency departments.

Professor Christensen said when similar strategies were simultaneously implemented at a community level in Europe, suicide rates fell 30 per cent.

“Which is an enormous reduction in suicides within five years,” she said.

Professor Christensen said it could cost about $5 million per site to apply, but the stakeholders were still in the scoping phase and the figure could change.

“It will require political will, buy in from community, NGOs and health organisations and development of materials for people to use,” she said.

Suicide Prevention Australia is calling for more than $20 million in funding from the Commonwealth, states and territories to begin the pilot.

“We will be working with the Federal and state governments, business and the general community to generate that level of income over the next four years,” Suicide Prevention Australia’s chief executive Sue Murray said.

“$20 million sounds like a lot of money, but it is actually not a lot of money.

“That is the amount of money that was spent in developing a research program to lower the risk of shark attacks in Western Australia, that was funded by the Government.”

Evidence shows suicide is preventable

In August the inaugural National Suicide Prevention Summit will be held in Canberra, to draw attention to the need for the pilot and to highlight current funding inequities.

Police, GPs and other frontline service providers have been invited.

Professor Christensen said Australia currently spent about four or five times more on skin cancer research than it did on suicide prevention.

“And yet suicide is a much higher burden and cost to our society,” she said.

“So there is a miss-match between the amounts of money that is spent on suicide prevention and that spent on other important disorders and really there needs to be compensation.

“Suicide costs the country something like $17 billion – and yet we only invest about $250 million over two years in suicide prevention activities.”

Professor Christensen said some people believed suicide was not preventable.

“Yet the evidence is very clearly the case that we can prevent suicide, so we should be,” she said.

“Part of the problem is that nobody takes responsibility for it and it is almost like it is (perceived) as an individual thing, yet government should take responsibility for the health and wellbeing of its citizens.

“There is a lot of opportunity for government to take responsibility for suicide prevention rather than regarding it as something that happens to individuals and their families.”

Fight to break stigma likened to breast cancer awareness campaign

Making conversations about suicide more acceptable and safe at the community level is the focus of an ongoing campaign by Suicide Prevention Australia, the peak national advocacy organisation.

“So that it is not difficult for an individual to say: ‘I am feeling vulnerable, I feel like I want to take my own life,” Dr Murray said.

While emphasising the need to avoid talking about method or location, Dr Murray said ingrained stigma within the community remained one of the biggest barriers to preventing suicide.

She likens breaking the silence around suicide to the task of encouraging open discussion about breast cancer in recent decades.

“What we saw with breast cancer is people moving from not saying anything about their diagnosis to being very public about their diagnosis,” she said.

“I can see that we can do the same thing with suicide, in terms of making it much more acceptable in the community to talk about this issue.”

This story is part of a series exploring issues around suicide.