Suicide Trends in Australia
Earlier this year when Sydney was in a COVID lockdown, I attended an online workshop on Data Visualisation and Tableau, hosted by the General Assembly. Up until this point I had never heard of Tableau, but I was curious to find out what it was. My Data Science major was teaching me how to create complex data models and predictive analytics, but there had been no focus on data visualisation. Throughout the workshop I discovered how powerful and intuitive Tableau was, and I loved the relative ease in which you could use it to create beautiful data visualisations.
A few weeks ago I completed my degree in Computer Science (hurray!) so now I finally have more free time to explore Tableau and create my own data visualisations. I decided to create my first one on suicide trends in Australia, as it’s a topic that’s close to my heart and one that we don’t talk about enough. I’ve published it here on Tableau Public.
The data I used came from the Intentional self-harm (suicide) dataset published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics here. An important thing to note about this data is that the ABS expects the number of recorded suicides in 2019 to increase, once the data undergoes the revisions process.
The key finding that stands out from my analysis is the alarming number of men who are dying from suicide. In 2019, males represented 75.41% of all suicides.
The Northern Territory and Tasmania had the highest percentages of suicides, when calculated as a percentage of their State/Territory populations. In 2019, suicides in these two regions made up 0.02% of their respective populations.
Over the past 10 years, suicides by males and females increased by 30.72% and 44.16% from 2010 to 2019. During this time the male and female population increased by 14.16% and 15.59% (based on the national population in December 2010 and 2019)
Despite this large increase over the past 10 years, the increase over the past 5 years has not been as large. From 2015 to 2019, suicides by males and females increased by 7.43% and 6.81%. During this time, the male and female population increased by 6.43% and 6.81%. Although we must keep in mind that the number of suicides in 2019 is likely to be revised to a higher figure, I’d like to hope that as a society we’re becoming better at preventing suicide.
