Question:
What is the rate of suicide in Australian men?
Answer:
Reporting on suicide
If you feel like you are at risk of suicide, call Lifeline (131114) or Mensline (1300 789978).
We respectfully acknowledge the real and valued people represented by these statistics, and the family, friends, colleagues and community that have been impacted by suicide.
We have followed the guidelines developed by Mindframe for this answer.
Statistics are from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
In 2022, 2,455 Australian males died by suicide. That’s nearly 19 suicides for every 100,000 males in Australia and nearly seven men per day. About 75% of people who died by suicide were males and 25% were females. The suicide rates for males and females in Australia haven’t changed over the past 10 years.
Even though the suicide rates haven’t changed in recent years, the number of Australians who die by suicide each year is increasing because our population is growing. In 2022, about 500 more Australian males died by suicide than in 2012.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian males aged 15 to 44 and is the third-leading cause of death for males aged 45 to 64. Almost one in three deaths of Australian males aged 15 to 24 are caused by suicide; for males aged 25-44 it’s one in four.
Some groups of the Australian population are more at risk of suicide than others, including Indigenous Australians, veterans, people receiving disability support pensions or unemployment payments, and males in custody.
You can read more about suicide here.
If you or someone else are at immediate risk of suicide, call 000 and ask for an ambulance.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Associate Professor Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
