Amendment
28 November 2025 – Additional suppressions have been made to supplementary data table.
17 November 2025 – In What are the leading causes of death? section, amendments have been made in Figure 2 (for confidence intervals), in Table 1 (for leading cause of death among reserve males aged 50–70), and text describing Table 1.
14 October 2024 – The downloadable excel ‘Data tables’ has been updated for a minor formatting correction.
Note that for these changes, the overall conclusions of this report remain the same, there were no sensitivities around any of the changes, and changes to any numbers were not of statistical significance.
Acknowledgements
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) thanks and acknowledges the large contribution by staff from a range of organisations in providing datasets and advice in the production of this report. These organisations are:
- Department of Defence
- Department of Veterans' Affairs
- Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
The AIHW acknowledge all of those serving and ex-serving Australian Defence Force (ADF) members who have died by suicide. We also acknowledge all of those who have been affected by suicide, including their families.
Ethical approval for the study was provided by the AIHW Ethics Committee and the Departments of Defence and Veterans' Affairs Human Research Ethics Committee.
The AIHW also thanks and acknowledges contributions of internal staff from the AIHW; Data Integration Service Centre who conducted the data-linkage, Ethics Privacy and Legal Unit who facilitated the ethics approval process and the Specialist Capability Unit who provided statistical guidance in the methods used for analysis.
The AIHW thanks internal reviews from staff from the AIHW Data Custodian Unit: Burden of Disease & Mortality Unit.
Finally, the AIHW also thanks Mindframe for providing review and advice on the appropriate and sensitive way to report on suicide.
