Notes

Acknowledgements

The AIHW thanks and acknowledges the large contribution by staff from a range of organisations in providing datasets and/or advice in conducting this project. These organisations are:

  • Department of Defence
  • Department of Veterans’ Affairs

Ethical approval of this project was provided by the AIHW Ethics Committee and Departments of Defence and Veterans’ Affairs Human Research Ethics Committee.

The AIHW also thanks and acknowledges contributions of internal staff from the AIHW:

  • Data Linkage who conducted the data-linkage
  • Ethics and Privacy Unit who facilitated the ethics approval process
  • Specialist Capability Unit who provided statistical guidance in the methods used for analysis and computed the shortest travel times to health services
  • Suicide and Self-Harm Monitoring Unit for advice on reporting on suicide and self-harm
  • Hospitals Analysis Support Unit who facilitated the Hospital data custodian, data asset governance and approval and researcher access.

The AIHW thanks internal reviews from staff from the AIHW: Lucy Ellen (Suicide and Self-Harm Monitoring Unit) and Jason Thomson (Mental Health Analytics and Reporting Service unit). AIHW also thanks external reviewers for their valuable input. These include: Dr Jenny Welsh (Australian National University), Associate Professor Carla Meurk (Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research), and Professor Meaghan O’Donnell (The University of Melbourne).

Finally, the AIHW also thanks Everymind for providing invaluable advice on the appropriate and sensitive way to report on self-harm.

Amendments

20 November 2025 – The odds ratio for mental health service use for the self-harm cohort in the year before admission was corrected from 6.95 to 6.97 in the Summary section to match the Main findings and underlying analysis. This was a text correction only; no data or analyses has changed.

 Clarified tooltip text in Figure 6 to explicitly label 95% confidence intervals. Analytical results are unchanged.