Introduction by Croakey: The National Suicide Prevention Office has released what it is describing as “a world-first initiative” that reframes how success in suicide prevention is measured and achieved.
The National Suicide Prevention Outcomes Map aims to connect community experiences with government decision-making; identify what protects people from suicidal distress; highlight what drives risk across different groups; and support scaling of effective programs nationally.
The Outcomes Map (see an overview graphic in the article below) was developed in partnership with people with lived and living experience, researchers, and service providers, and is a key recommendation of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025–2035.
This strategy stresses the importance of addressing the drivers of distress, including adversity, discrimination and disadvantage; responding compassionately with accessible, trauma-informed and culturally safe supports; and ensuring governments, services and communities work together to provide coordinated care, embed lived experience and improve data and accountability.
Importantly, we are now seeing a focus on the upstream conditions that can prevent suicidal distress, such as safety, social and economic security, good health, and belonging and inclusion, says Jo Riley, a member of the National Suicide Prevention Office Lived Experience Partnership Group. She reflects below on the significance of this development in the context of her own family’s history.
Jo Riley writes:
For nearly two decades, I’ve listened to people share their experiences of suicidal distress, suicide loss, and the long aftermath that follows both. These stories, shared with honesty and generosity, come from very different lives. Yet many point to a common truth: suicidal distress is rarely one thing, or simply “inside” a person.
Those stories sit alongside my own, and my dad’s. As a younger person, I experienced suicidal crisis shaped by shame, disconnection, and a sense that something was fundamentally wrong with me. Not long after, my family lost my dad to suicide.
At the time, both felt like personal failures. Over time, my understanding has shifted.
These experiences feel intensely personal, and they are, but personal distress typically does not arise in a vacuum. It grows in particular conditions: the pressures we carry, the expectations we internalise, the resources and supports we can access, and whether we feel safe, secure, and that we matter. Individual, relational and clinical factors are part of the picture too, but none exist in isolation.
What I consistently hear from people with lived and living experience is this: first, help needs to actually be helpful. This means support that is compassionate, appropriate, accessible, holistic and effective. Second, more needs to be done to prevent the emergence of suicidal distress before it takes hold.
For decades, suicide prevention has been measured largely by what systems do: funding announcements, services delivered, crisis responses activated. These efforts may matter, but they are not outcomes.
Until now, the clearest outcome measure has been the suicide rate itself. But while critical, it arrives too late – after a life has been lost, and the opportunity for prevention is gone.
Worse, despite all our effort, Australia’s suicide rate has been stubbornly resistant to change. That reality should do more than concern us. It should demand a serious reckoning with what is, and is not, changing.
If the outcome we care about isn’t improving, what does that say about where we are putting our effort? What are we measuring, and what are we still failing to see?
Suicide rates and aggregate risk factors are not enough. They tell us little about whether supports are helpful, whether people feel safer, more connected or more hopeful, and whether our systems are easing the pressures that make life feel unliveable, or adding to them.
So, the question becomes harder to avoid: are we prepared to measure what actually matters, and be accountable for what it shows?
Continuing to do more of the same, and measuring it in the same way, will not get us different results. This is why the National Suicide Prevention Outcomes Framework, and specifically the Outcomes Map, matter.
This work is not abstract for me. I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to the Framework and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy 2025-2035. Each was developed in partnership with people with lived and living experience of suicidal distress, caring and bereavement, and through consultation with communities most affected by suicide.
The Framework treats quantitative data and lived experience narrative as complementary forms of evidence that, together, provide a fuller picture of people’s lives and suicidal distress. This approach embraces rather than reduces complexity, helping us see important differences more clearly and act on what they reveal.
For example, in quantitative data I might appear simply as someone who experienced relationship breakdown before a suicidal crisis, which risks distorting what would have prevented my distress. It was not about that relationship. Genuine prevention needed to focus years earlier on safety in intimate partner relationships, reducing alcohol-related harm and building my sense of purpose and value.
Both my dad and I accessed inpatient mental healthcare when we were suicidal. In the data, that may look similar. But heartbreakingly, my dad died weeks after discharge, while the support I received eased my distress. The data shows we both accessed care. It does not explain why I am here, and he is not.
The Framework leans into the “why” by listening to people’s stories and asking deeper questions of our services: did support address what was driving distress? Did people feel understood, valued, heard and empowered? Did life become more possible afterwards?
The Framework also explores whether experiences differ for groups disproportionately impacted by suicide. This matters because suicide does not affect everyone equally. Some communities carry a heavier burden, shaped by greater exposure to violence, disadvantage, discrimination, trauma and barriers to care.
If we do not make these differences visible, we risk defaulting to responses based on national averages that fail those most affected.
Upstream focus
In a first for suicide prevention, the Framework formally includes measurement of upstream prevention as a core component of suicide prevention policy. This brings into focus the conditions that can prevent suicidal distress: safety, social and economic security, good health, belonging and inclusion, and the capacity to navigate life’s challenges.
In doing so, it shifts how we think about where prevention happens. It opens up questions about how decisions across housing, safety, income, health, community and support systems connect, prompting us to ask:
- Does it relieve pressure — or add to it?
- Does it strengthen belonging — or deepen division?
- Does it ease distress — or allow it to escalate to crisis?
It begins to show how action across systems connects to the outcomes that matter in people’s lives, and how we might track whether those outcomes are improving over time.
Used to guide decisions, funding and accountability, the Framework changes the standards we set for ourselves, our organisations, our institutions and our leaders.
When we measure whether life is improving, not just whether effort was made, it becomes clearer what is worth investing in and what needs to change.
This is the shift in accountability we need: not asking only whether services were delivered, but whether they made life more liveable; not whether a policy was announced, but whether it reduced distress.
For me, this comes back to where I began: my dad’s story, my own, and the many stories I’ve had the privilege of hearing. Together, they point to a fuller picture of suicidal distress, shaped not only within individuals but by the conditions in which we live.
If we want to prevent deaths like my dad’s, and reduce the distress so many carry, we need to be willing to see that fuller picture, including what is harder to measure and harder to change.
Then we need to act on it – and be accountable for what follows.
Because in the end, suicide prevention is not measured by what we do. It is measured by whether living becomes more possible.
Author details
Jo Riley is a lived experience advocate with more than 15 years’ experience across suicide prevention policy, research and practice. Jo works to ensure lived experience is meaningfully and safely embedded in how suicide prevention systems are designed, delivered and evaluated. Jo is a member of the National Suicide Prevention Office Lived Experience Partnership Group and contributes to national conversations on reform, drawing on lived experience, community insight and sector expertise. Jo advocates for approaches that value different forms of evidence, including research, practice knowledge and lived experience, to strengthen how suicide prevention efforts respond to real-world needs and improve outcomes for individuals and communities.
Support services
Lifeline: 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14 for 24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services
13YARN: 13 92 76
1800Respect: 1800 737 732
The Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention (CBPATSISP)
Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467
Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800
MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
QLIFE: 1800 184 527
StandBy Support After Suicide: 1300 727 247
headspace: 1800 650 890
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the social determinants of health
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