In order to prevent Indigenous suicides the Government begins to roll it out across Australia by giving a community based support service. Indigenous communities will receive $10 million dollar funding. The project started in Western Australia last year that will expand through the Northern Territory and South Australia this year. While the rest of the country to follow in 2018.
The funding on the remote Groote Eyelandt will be announced today in the Northern Territory by the Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion. He said in a statement that every suicide is a tragedy and the effects on tight-knit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are often more profound, contributing to the clusters of suicide and self-harm that we see. In 2014, suicide was the fifth-leading cause of death for Indigenous people.
Young Indigenous people commit suicide five times the rate of other Australians. The Critical Response Service is led by a Bunuba and Gija woman from WA who has worked in suicide prevention for almost two decades, Adele Cox. She said that families were struggling families did not know where to go. There are so many communities and families that are not receiving the right sort of support from the government. This difficulty leads to Indigenous suicide.
According to the ABC, more than a third of Australia’s youth commit suicide and 80 percent of the of those make up of Indigenous children age under 12 takes their own lives. This is a date reported by Indigenous suicide researcher Gerry Georgatos, who works with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project.
According to the CBC, that there have been inadequately funded health care, inadequately funded education and inadequately funded child service for the First Nation Children. Mr Georgatos said grieving families needed ongoing psychosocial support which was not always available in remote communities. Through this funding it is hoped that the number of Indigenous suicide will decrease and the families that are struggling will have more hope with life.