Page 1473 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
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stigma attached to suicide. We lose approximately six Australians every day to suicide. The cost on the individual and their family, their friends, the wider community is too great to comprehend.
Whilst this is a difficult topic to address, the community is changing in the way we discuss the topic. In August last year, the Press Council moved to new guidelines on the way to report suicides. They acknowledged that, due to social media and a greater understanding in the community, it was appropriate at times to now report that a death was the result of suicide, and this move reflects the community’s changing attitude to suicide and acknowledges that the stigma attached is slowly changing.
It is important that we continue to work to reduce the stigma attached to suicide. Making suicide a taboo topic damages social relationships, removes avenues of assistance to people who are too embarrassed to seek help and inflicts ongoing suffering on those people who have lived with the experience of suicide. By speaking openly, we can open channels of dialogue, encourage people to seek help, and acknowledge that we are feeling this way.
Suicide is a complex issue and its causes are unique to every individual. Suicide is usually the tragic end point of various possible pathways influenced by mental ill health and psychological, socioeconomic, familial, interpersonal and genetic factors.
The link between mental illness and suicide is not necessarily direct. Not all people that have suicidal thoughts have a mental illness, and most certainly not everyone with a mental illness has suicidal thoughts. Therefore, we cannot rely merely on the traditional mental health government agencies and community groups to address this issue. We need national and local action. We need to target specific population groups. We need, as a whole, to form a community approach and we need people to be aware of how their peers are feeling and how to address this.
Suicide prevention is not, therefore, solely the concern of mental health services. Some two-thirds of all people who commit suicide have not received specialist psychiatric care in the year before their death. A focus on suicide is directly relevant to mental health strategies in primary care, especially improved detection and treatment of depression, even if general practitioners rarely experience suicide in one of their patients.
This motion notes that the Senate Community Affairs References Committee released a report in June 2010 called The hidden toll: suicide in Australia. The committee undertook widespread consultation and research on the issue of suicide and how best to reduce the incidence of suicide. An important place to start, they recommended, was better data collection and reporting of suicide.
The ABS has begun a process to revise the way the suicide data is collected. The Senate committee also called for the National Committee for Standardisation of Reporting on Suicide to be extended for this purpose. The biannual reporting of the number of suicides in the ACT will help raise awareness and help remove the stigma attached to suicide. By providing more information around the incidence of suicide, we can start to better understand how to address it.
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