carol83,
Any figures there that tell us how many suicides were through stupidity i.e. Drug overdose ?

Hi, Individual. Deaths from drug overdoses can happen deliberately, accidently or from murder. The coroner is always involved and must make a finding about the death. The police may be involved from the beginning or later, if the coroner calls for their help. Whatever deaths are said to be suicide, and sometimes this is simple because of a note left, will eventually be numbered in yearly ABS suicides under the heading 'death from drug overdose'.
Mental illnesses and deaths are rising because drug use among young people is increasing.

But suicides did fall under Howard, Killarney. They were highest under Hawke and Keating. I'm not sure what your point is. Shouldn't one look at "raw" statistics for oneself rather than relying on the results of a study? If the studies have fiddled with the statistics, we need to understand how, and whether this is legitimate.

Is your argument that there should have been a lot more suicides after the GFC, so really rates went down dramatically under Rudd and then Gillard? So how do we adjust for the Asian crisis when Howard was in power? Should we adjust down for the 1991 recession, allowing Labor a better figure?

Mental illnesses and deaths are rising because drug use among young people..
carol83,
Ask yourself why this drug use is there in the first place. I tell you why, it's because of stupidity. No-one with a sober, intelligent mind will take to drugs period ! It's people who are bored because they've never had to do anything for themselves through their own initiative because they've been mollycoddled since birth. Were they exposed to some discipline & responsibility i.e. a national service then they would have a healthier mentality & therefore many would not take drugs & possibly even discourage others from taking drugs. The anti-westerners are laughing all the way into our country because they can see the results of their effort of supplying drugs for our stupid is having the desired effect. To rub salt into the wound these moron drugies get priority in our hospitals whilst decent people have to wait for treatment.

Where do the "CARING™" develop such hysterical positions. What kills is lack of control and a future, the stock in trade of Lefties, they need the hoi polloi to be dependent to inflate their sense of worth (and power). Why else their continual disparagement of aspirationals? Any number of first level psychology text books show damage when creatures are in hopeless, pointless situations.

Graham

Firstly, I did not deny that the rates went down under Howard, so I'm not going to address that point again.

Secondly, ‘If the studies have fiddled with the statistics, we need to understand how, and whether this is legitimate.’

Well one of these studies is a published book, ‘The Body Economic: Why austerity kills’, co-authored by Dr. David Stuckler, Senior Research Leader at Oxford University and Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Dr. Sanjay Basu, Assistant Professor of Medicine and epidemiologist at the Prevention Research Center of Stanford University.

And the book does cover the Asian crisis, the collapse of the Soviet economy, the Great Depression and other significant 20th century economic shocks.

The other study is from a team headed by Professor Richard Taylor of the University of NSW, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health and a bunch of other esteemed academic journals.

Not exactly bastions of looney leftism. And I suppose it’s possible they 'fiddled with the statistics', but I don’t know why they’d want to. Perhaps there’s scope for you to expose an Austeritygate scandal along the lines of Climategate.