Poor twice as likely to commit suicide

Julie Robotham Medical Editor
September 11, 2006
SMH

YOUNG adults from disadvantaged backgrounds are almost twice as likely to commit suicide as their more affluent peers, new research has found.

Despite overall reductions in suicides, the proportion of people from low socio-economic groups who took their lives between 1999 and 2003 rose more steeply than at any other period in the previous three decades, analysis by Richard Taylor, professor of population health at the University of Queensland, found.

"These aren't individual phenomena, these are group phenomena," Professor Taylor said.

"We've got to get beyond the psychiatric model … depression is not an answer. Depression is a question. We have got to look harder at what are the social and economic underpinnings of risk."

Suicide rates peaked in the late 1990s, when the wider use of anti-depressants and the introduction of a National Suicide Prevention Strategy began to turn around an increase that had persisted since the 1970s.

But Professor Taylor said these measures had been insufficient to save the lives of people lower down the income and education scales, who were increasingly priced out of the housing market and denied secure employment.

It was also possible that poorer people had less access to specialist mental health services and medications for their mood disorder and that mental health campaigns might be bypassing the most vulnerable people because their messages were "made by the middle class for the middle class".

Professor Taylor found suicides among 20- to 34-year-old men in the most disadvantaged one-fifth of the population had risen by 8 per cent in the five years from 1999 to 2003, compared with the preceding period, to 48.6 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people. That was nearly double the 27 per 100,000 of young men from the most affluent one-fifth of backgrounds, whose suicide rate fell by 15 per cent over the same period.

The analysis, published this week in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, applied Australian Bureau of Statistics rankings of the relative socioeconomic status of small geographic areas to the addresses of people who had died by suicide.