Serving and ex-serving Australian Defence Force members who have served since 1985: suicide monitoring 2001 to 2019

For ex-serving members who have died by suicide, time since separation is the time between separation from the ADF¹ and date of death. In this report, time since separation is presented in five groups (ranging from less than 1 year to more than 20 years).

Overall, around half of the ex-serving population (49.5% of males and 50.8% of females) who served since 1985, separated from the ADF 20 or more years ago, followed by just under one quarter (23.7% of males and 24% of females) between 10 and 20 years ago. The proportion of the population who separated between 1 and 5 years ago is 13.2% of males, and 11.7% of females. Around 2.5% of males and 2.6% of females separated less than 1 year ago.

Notes:

1. The period between separation date and extract date (31 December 2019) for those alive at the extract date. The period between separation date and death for ex-serving members who have died.
2. Due to the scope of the study population, suicide rates for time since separation 20 or more are from 2005–2019.

Source: AIHW analysis of linked Defence historical personnel data–PMKeyS–NDI data 1985–2019.

The average time since separation was nearly 19 years and was the same for males and females. The maximum length of time since separation that could be observed in this study was 34 years.

The rates of suicide were similar regardless of time since separation for both ex-serving males and females.

Figure 15: Suicide rate by time since separation, ex-serving males and females, 2002–2019

Source: AIHW analysis of linked Defence historical personnel data–PMKeyS–NDI data 1985–2019.

Time since separation: ex-serving male members over time

Suicide rates over time for ex-serving males by time since separation are presented in the interactive graph below. Note due to small numbers of suicide deaths in less than one year since separation category, data are aggregated and presented for less than five years since separation.

Due to the small number of suicide deaths among ex-serving females, suicide rates over time are not reported.

Although there has been some small variation in the suicide rates for individual groups over time, these variations were not significant.

The interactive graph below presents the suicide rates for ex-serving males in each of the time since separation groups , for all 3-year periods from 2002-2004 to 2017-2019.

Note: The confidence intervals in this figure can be used to determine the significance of differences between the suicide rates calculated for the ex-serving within a given 3-year period. However, they cannot be used to determine the significance of differences between rates calculated for the ex-serving population for overlapping 3-year time periods (for example 2002–2004 and 2003–2005).

Data underlying this graph are available in Supplementary table S6.6 See Data for a link to the tables.

Please note, data for more recent years are subject to change; see Technical notes for further detail.
 

1. Note that the separation point used in this study reflects full separation from the ADF – that is, when a member is no longer in permanent or reserve service. For example, a member who transitions from full time service to the inactive reserves is counted as permanent for the purpose of length of service calculations until he or she separates from the reserves.