Serving and ex-serving Australian Defence Force members who have served since 1985: suicide monitoring 1997 to 2022

The Serving and ex-serving Australian Defence Force members who have served since 1985: suicide monitoring 1997 to 2022 report is a statistical report that presents both counts and incidence rates of suicides for members of the ADF who have at least one day of service between 1 January 1985 and 31 December 2022, with the suicides monitored over the period 1 January 1997 to 31 December 2022. Information in the report is presented by age, sex, rank, length of service, time since separation and reason for separation. 

An additional 86 suicide deaths are reported here compared with the 2023 report. The breakdown of changes in the number of suicide deaths reported is as follows:

• 71 suicide deaths that occurred in 2022
• 15 additional deaths in 2021 (13) and 2020 (2) subsequently identified as suicides caused by a lag in reporting cause of death, updates to the National Death Index (NDI) or newly identified linkages.

Despite these changes in suicide totals the rates of suicide amongst serving and ex-serving members of the ADF remain largely consistent between this and previous reports. Due to changes in the monitoring period and study cohort, care should be taken when comparing data in this report with previous AIHW publications. It is more useful to focus instead on suicide rates, as these give a better indication of the risk of suicide to different groups within the ADF population.

This report uses information from the Defence Personnel Management Key Solution (PMKeyS) which started on 1 January 2001 together with a range of Defence historical personnel systems used prior to 2001 to develop a list of all members who had served at least one day since 1 January 1985. This is then linked to the National Death Index. Deaths are reported from 1 January 1997 to 31 December 2022.

Suicide rates are not provided prior to 1997 due to data in the NDI being incomplete or otherwise unusable before this date, meaning the linkage between the Defence personnel data and the deaths data is liable to miss deaths. As such it was deemed unworkable to extend the death analysis earlier than 1997 for population analysis study purposes.

Due to limitations in historical Department of Defence personnel records, the study population does not include ADF members with service prior to 1 January 1985.

The assembling and national reporting of deaths by suicide has up to a two-year time lag. Deaths that are referred to a coroner (including deaths by suicide) can take time to be fully investigated by the relevant State or Territory jurisdiction. To account for this, all coroner-certified deaths registered after 1 January 2006 are subject to a revisions process. This allows cause of death for open coroner’s cases to be included at a later stage where the case is closed during the revision period. Cause of death data compiled by the ABS are deemed preliminary when first published, with revised and final versions of the data being historically published 12 and 24 months after initial processing.

A person who is serving or has served at least one day in the ADF since 1 January 1985.

Overall, males serving in a permanent capacity and males in the reserves are about half as likely to die by suicide as Australian males.

Ex-serving ADF members are at a higher risk of suicide than Australian males though this group is not homogeneous, with other factors likely contributing to differing rates of suicide for subpopulations.

Notably, ex-serving males who separate for voluntary reasons are no more likely to die by suicide than the general Australian male population. Those ex-serving males who separate for involuntary reason of Retention not in service interest and involuntary medical reasons are more likely to die by suicide than the Australian male population.

Compared with the Australian population, suicide rates (after adjusting for age) between 1997 and 2022 were:

• 47% lower for male permanent ADF members
• 45% lower for reserve ADF males
• 26% higher for ex-serving ADF males
• 100% (or 2.00 times) higher for ex-serving ADF females.

This monitoring report compares the suicide rate of serving and ex-serving ADF members with the general Australian population to provide an understanding of how suicide rates among ADF members change over time with respect to the general Australian population. This provides a context within which to understand the ADF information but does not provide strong evidence either for or against the existence of a protective factor against suicide associated with ADF service.

Further analyses, including sophisticated modelling and/or prospective research studies, would be required to establish a causative link between ADF service and either an increased or reduced risk of suicide.

To provide context to information about suicide among ADF population, it is useful to ‘place’ that information within the context of what is occurring within the general population. It is important, for example, to note the ADF population age and sex demographics are different from the Australian population¹ and may be a contributing factor to observed differences.

These age and sex differences are considered when examining differences in suicide levels between these populations, and comparisons are presented where these differences are controlled for.

In this report comparisons to the Australian population are presented for analysis of ADF sub-groups by age, sex, service status (permanent, reserve and ex-serving), prior service status (permanent ex-serving and reserve ex-serving) and reason for separation.

There are other measures under study where comparisons within the veteran population are also useful, including underlying factors such as the service (Army, Navy, Air Force), rank, length of service and time since separation. For these ADF sub-groups comparisons are made across the sub-groups (for example, Army is compared with Navy and Air Force).

The AIHW acknowledges a desire for further investigation exploring additional ADF comparator populations, for instance, studying variations between ex-serving ADF members who experienced involuntary medical separation and people who experienced similar loss of employment due to medical conditions in the general population, or including comparisons between other socio-economic factors such as employment-status, income, household situation, etc. While there is likely to be considerable benefit to be gained through these more detailed studies, this type of analysis extends outside the scope of routine suicide monitoring.

1. To illustrate, the permanent, reserve and ex-serving ADF populations have different age structures with median ages of 31, 37 and 52 years respectively compared with 46 years for the Australian population over 17 years of age. While the permanent, reserve and ex-serving populations are 83% male, and the Australian population is 50% male.

The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, conducted between 2021 to 2024, inquired into the systemic issues and risk factors relevant to suicide and suicide behaviours of serving and ex-serving Defence members. The Final Report by the Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission outlines the results of the investigation and the Commissioner’s recommendations.

Among these results in the Final Report are suicide rate analysis among the ADF population. Caution should be used when comparing these data with the information that the AIHW publishes on veterans suicide such as those presented in this monitoring report.

The differences between the Final Report and this AIHW report include variations in:

• the monitoring period. The AIHW report includes the most recent year of available deaths data (2022) in analysis
• the groups for suicide rate comparison with the ADF population. For example, the Final Report includes analysis that compares the suicide rate of the serving ADF population with employed Australian population
• the service-related characteristics analysed, and the statistical methods used for analysis.

Among ex-serving males, the factors that were most associated with suicide were involuntary separation for the reason of Retention not in service interest or for medical reasons, separation at ranks other than officer, service with at least one day in the permanent forces, and a length of service of less than 1 year.

Due to suicide being a relatively rare event, small differences in numbers between years can have disproportionate influence on the population rate trends, making them difficult to interpret. To assist in overcoming this, the rates are presented as the aggregate of overlapping 3-year periods, increasing the number in each period and, thereby, reducing the volatility in the trend. Additionally, confidence intervals are presented to show the degree of statistical uncertainty around the rates and serve as a guiding caution in interpreting any trend over time.

Following the start of the monitoring period in 1997, there was a drop in the rate of suicide among ex-serving males, with the lowest rate recorded being in 2005-2007 (26.0 per 100,000 population per year). Since then, there was no consistent trend to 2014-2016. Over recent times, the suicide rate has been declining since 2014–2016 to 2020–2022 (33.3 to 27.6 deaths per 100,000 population per year). However, firm conclusions of a trend cannot be drawn as the period 2020–2022 includes preliminary deaths data that is likely to be adjusted upward by an unknown amount. See Technical notes.

There are no consistent trends in the suicide rates among permanent males, reserve males, and ex-serving females throughout the monitoring period due to the small number of suicide deaths each year. While fluctuating, the rates have stayed below those observed among ex-serving males throughout the period. The suicide rate per 100,000 population per year for the most recent 3-year period of 2020–2022 was 18.5 for permanent males, 13.4 for reserve males, and 12.6 for ex-serving females.

The following is sourced from the Phoenix Australia - Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health ADF members and ex-members suicide literature review: An update | Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (17 Oct 2023).

For serving defence force members there is evidence from the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand that corresponds with Australian evidence that suicide rates are lower amongst current serving military males than in the general male population, though this is not universal. In Canada, Germany and the United States (US), evidence suggests that rates of suicide amongst current serving males are equivalent to or higher than those in the general male population, with younger soldiers and those serving in the Army at particular risk.

For male ex-serving defence force members, in concurrence with evidence from Australia, rates from the US and Canada suggest that male ex-serving defence members are at higher risk of dying by suicide than the general male population, though this is not universal. The UK, the Netherlands, and to an extent Sweden are notable in that suicide mortality was lower for ex-serving military males than in the general male population.

For female ex-serving defence force members, those in the Canadian Armed Forces had an increased rate of suicide compared to the general female population, as similarly observed among Australian female ex-serving members.

On March 2020 the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a pandemic (WHO 2020). As of 30 November 2023, 20,755 Australians have died with or from COVID-19 where COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death in Australia in 2022 (ABS 2023, ABS 2022). While there has been a rise in the use of mental health and crisis services during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic was found not to be associated with a rise in suspected deaths by suicide in 2020 and 2021 among the general Australian population (AIHW 2023). Similarly, using preliminary mortality data for deaths information from 2020 and 2021, findings in this report show that the suicide rates among ADF permanent, reserve, or ex-serving males and ex-serving females in the 3-year period of 2019–2021 were not significantly different to the respective suicide rates of the previous 3-year period of 2016–2018 (see Figure 4). This trend was also observed among US veteran cohorts (US Department of Veteran Affairs 2023).