Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – More than 1,200 Australian Defence Force veterans and serving personnel have died by suicide in the past two decades — almost three times higher than the number previously reported.
Five months after the announcement of a royal commission into veteran suicides, new figures give a clearer picture of the crisis
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says 1,273 former and serving defence personnel have taken their lives since 2001
This year’s report has for the first time considered veterans who served from 1985 to 2000, not just from the past two decades
The latest data gives a clearer picture of the scale of the crisis in Australia, five months after the Prime Minister’s announcement of a wide-ranging royal commission into defence and veteran suicides to examine “the human cost” of defence service.
The latest figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reveal 1,062 ex-servicemen and women, and a further 211 serving personnel, took their own lives between 2001 and 2019.
It is a dramatic increase on last year’s report which recorded 267 veteran suicides, and 198 suicides by serving ADF personnel since 2001, but the discrepancy is due to a wider data set now being examined.
