Reporting about suicide?

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Researchers’ citation

Please cite this page as:

Black, T. R. (2026). Australia: pediatric suicide rates, ages 0–19. Retrieved [date], from https://pediatricsuicides.ca/australia/

Author identifier: ORCID 0000-0002-5681-4930
Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22672942

Download the data — every count and denominator on this site, as CSV, with notes.

Australia · 1998–2024 · Ages 0–19

Pediatric Suicides in Australia

Australia's pediatric suicide rate has fallen by about a third since 1998, from 2.95 to 2.01 per 100,000 — and in 2024 it fell sharply again, by 15%, while adult suicide in Australia did not move at all.

FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT SUICIDE RATES BEFORE YOU REPORT ANYTHING!

Suicides are expressed as "# per 100,000 per year," but in some jurisdictions this means that we are converting very small numbers into rates (14/400,000 population, for example). Because of this, small changes in numbers of death can create 'bumpy' rate charts. The whole purpose of the confidence intervals and statistical significance on this page is to help you understand what is simply noise and what may be a true change.

This chart groups age "0-19" suicides, but it's important to note that 0-19 is really not what we are looking at. Suicides under 10 are extremely rare (<1 per million person years), and suicide rates increase with age all the way to age 19. So the "pool" of 0-19 is describing 19 year old suicides (12.3 per 100,000) more than it's describing 10 year old suicides (0.4 per 100,000), by a large margin. It is best to think of the "0-19" number as including young children but mostly being older adolescents.

Be cautious comparing jurisdictions like states or countries; there are huge differences in culture, methods available, ethnicity, poverty, and other variables. It's even been shown that religious coroners are less likely to adjudicate findings of suicide than non-religious coroners!

Media recommendations for responsible coverage - SAVE: Suicide Prevention, Information, and Awareness

Years shown

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Comparison window

Female: In 2024, the rate was 1.42 per 100,000 per year. The fitted trend has been falling 0.6% a year since 2012 (95% CI −2.4% to +1.2%); across 2000–2024 the model finds 2 changes of direction. Male: In 2024, the rate was 2.62 per 100,000 per year. The fitted trend has been falling 10.1% a year since 2019 (95% CI −13.3% to −6.8%); across 2000–2024 the model finds 2 changes of direction.

Show the numbers behind this view

Latest year available: 2024 (2.03 per 100k/year)2024 (latest year)2.03/100k/yearages 0–19

Year-over-year: −26% (−41% to −7%)Year-over-year−26%95% CI −41% to −7%2023: 2.76 per 100,000

2024 vs its trend: −18% (n.s., −34% to +2%)2024 vs its trend−18%(n.s.)95% CI −34% to +2%The trend through 2023 predicted 2.48 per 100,000

Highest year on record: 2018 (3.36 per 100k/year)Highest year on record3.36/100k/year2018

Human-reviewed8 September 2026review process vetting-v1

Every page on this site was looked at by me, one at a time, before it was published. This is exactly what that involved, and what it did not.

What I checked

The numbers, year by year: deaths and the population they are counted against, from the file the page is built from.
That the arithmetic agrees with itself. A rate equals its deaths over its person-time, every interval contains the rate it belongs to, the sexes add up to the combined figure, and no year appears twice or goes missing. These are checked by machine on every build, and I read what it reports.
The case definition and the age band, against what the source publishes, and whether either changes part-way through the series.
The source, its link and the date it was retrieved.
Every chart view the page offers, drawn, and read.
WHO's own grade for the country's cause-of-death data, where there is one, and whether the page reads more confidently than that grade allows.
The prose, against the numbers it describes.

What I did not

I did not re-obtain the primary source documents or re-key the data from them. Where a national statistics office publishes a figure, this site carries that figure.
This is not a re-analysis. I have not attempted to correct, adjust or model around a country's counting; I have shown what it published and said what I know about how it was counted.
Being reviewed does not mean a series is comparable with any other. It means I have looked at it and said what it is.

Automated checks ran over every page and I read their output. A language model was used on some pages to suggest things worth a second look; nothing it produced is published, and nothing it said stands as a finding on its own.

A review is a point in time. If the data behind a page changes afterwards, the page does not ship again until it has been looked at again — that rule is enforced when the site is deployed, not left to memory.

A note from the reviewer

Coroner's Study: Researchers read the actual 2006-2015 coroners' files for every young Australian aged 10 to 24 who died by suicide over a decade, going through police reports, autopsy findings and toxicology screens to see what was happening in those lives. Most who died were boys and young men, and most were older teens or young adults rather than children. About half had a diagnosed mental health condition, most often depression. But most of the young people who died were not in any kind of mental health care when they died, and very few had ever been in hospital or through an emergency department for it. Only a minority had a known history of self-harm or a past attempt. What many did do was talk about it; a good number had told a friend or family member they were thinking about suicide, and about a quarter left a note. Drugs and alcohol were common, with cannabis showing up most often and a third having been drinking near the time of death. On the social side, a large share were neither working nor studying, more than a third lived in the poorest parts of the country, and a lot had recently been through a breakup or had a family that had split up. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people were badly overrepresented. Hanging was by far the most common method, and most died at home. (Hill et al., 2021)

Victoria youth suicides: through the end of July 2026, Victoria's Coroners Court recorded 11 deaths among people under 18 and 37 among 18- to 24-year-olds. At the same point in the four previous years, the under-18 counts were 4, 17, 8 and 13, and the 18-24 counts were 38, 34, 49 and 42. That is a lot of movement in both directions and no direction overall, which is what you'd expect from numbers this small. The court says as much in its own preamble: month-to-month and year-to-year swings in Victorian suicide data usually come from random variation rather than anything systemic. The 2022-to-2023 jump in under-18s, from 4 to 17, looks dramatic and almost certainly is not. (Coroners Court of Victoria, 2026)

(Old) Surveys of Youth: Researchers took a 2014 national survey of Australian 12- to 17-year-olds who were asked directly whether they had hurt themselves or attempted suicide in the past year, then combined it with Census data to estimate self-harm rates for tiny areas across the whole country — roughly suburb-sized patches averaging 400 people. About 1 in 12 young people reported self-harm of some kind in the past year, most of it without suicidal intent, and rates were highest in girls aged 16 and 17. At the level of the individual, nothing came close to mental health as a predictor: high psychological distress and major depression stood out by a wide margin, with low family connectedness also notable. At the level of the neighbourhood, the single strongest signal was the share of households headed by a single parent who was out of the workforce. Living in an area where a lot of parents were born overseas went the other way and looked protective, which the authors link to the healthy-migrant effect, though they note it might partly be underreporting where stigma runs high. The most useful finding is the messiest one: the relationships flipped depending on where you looked. Disadvantage predicted more self-harm nationally, but inside most capital cities the wealthy areas had the higher rates, and the picture for Indigenous population share was non-linear in a way the authors say needs Indigenous-led research to make sense of. Australia sadly does not survey its youth frequently, which is why an analysis of 2014 data is being shared in 2024. (Hielscher et al., 2024)

Clustering Analysis: Researchers went back through Australian police and coroner files for young people aged 10 to 24 who died by suicide over a decade, looking for cases where the young people actually knew each other and found dozens of these linked groups. The question they asked was why clusters form, and the answer looks like two things happening at once. The first is contagion in a fairly literal sense: when the first young person to die used a particular method, the ones who followed were strikingly likely to use that same method, which suggests they were taking something specific from the death, not just grieving it. The second is that clusters don't form randomly across the population, they form among young people who already resemble each other. When the first death was in a remote community, or the young person was Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, the ones who followed tended to share that. So the young people at risk were already clustered together socially before anyone died. The timing matters too: half of the linked deaths happened within about three months of the first one, which is a narrow window for anyone trying to respond. However, this relies on whatever police and coroners happened to write down, so links that were never asked about were never found, and the analysis had to drop the cases where the first death was an adult... even though roughly a third of exposures were to an adult's suicide. (Hill et al., 2020)