Suicide remains the leading cause of death for young Australians, but the research shows it is preventable.
As we mark World Suicide Prevention Day, the call to action is more pressing than ever, with alarming new data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies showing one in three Australian teens experience suicidal thoughts or behaviours every year.
The theme of this year's International Association for Suicide Prevention's (IASP) World Suicide Prevention Day is ‘Change the narrative’, and as we mark this global awareness event we're highlighting just some of the ways Orygen is taking action.
Orygen’s Head of Suicide Research and President of IASP, Professor Jo Robinson, said changing how we think and talk about suicide is a vital part of prevention efforts – bringing the issue out in the open and highlighting the need for greater understanding and investment.
“One youth suicide is one too many – and has a huge ripple effect on family, friends and the broader community,” Professor Robinson said.
“At Orygen we're doing everything we can to understand why these thoughts and behaviours occur in young people, how we can identify and address them as early as possible, and how we can transform how we think and talk about suicide to change these statistics once and for all.”
In the last month alone, Orygen researchers have published new research on predicting the first onset of suicidal thoughts and behaviours to enable earlier intervention, a new paper on involving young people with lived experience in suicide research and a paper on making suicide prevention programs in schools more effective, amongst others.
Orygen's world-leading #chatsafe resources are also changing the narrative, one download at a time: reaching the milestone of 500,000 downloads in August. #chatsafe offers evidence-based resources to support young people to have safe online conversations about suicide and self-harm, and with half a million downloads worldwide it's making a tangible difference to how we have these conversations.