Investment and Financial Services Association (IFSA) chief executive John Brogden last week launched Lifeline Australia's new suicide prevention television community service announcement.
Sometimes in among all the meetings and networking in 'finance-land' it becomes easy to forget the bigger picture. Brogden's appearance in his role as Lifeline Patron was a timely reminder of the grim statistics and the silence surrounding what has become an epidemic in this country.
According to Lifeline statistics, suicide is the leading cause of death for men under the age of 44 and women under the age of 34.
The announcement, entitled "You can do something", is focused on providing an accessible suicide prevention message to the whole community.
At the launch, Brogden said everyone had a role to play and having conversations about what was a difficult topic could go some way to reducing the number of unnecessary deaths.
And IFSA isn't the only financial services group talking about suicide.
Industry fund Tasplan has plans to increase its focus on mental health awareness on the back of a statistical analysis of its death claims experience.
The fund's analysis conducted on the death claims for the period 1 January 2002 to 30 November 2009 revealed 9 per cent of all claims were attributed to suicide and 23 per cent of all claims were listed as cause of death unknown.
"Tasmania has the highest incidence of suicide in Australia and you see that Tasplan suicides have increased considerably over the last 24 months. It is difficult to determine a single reason for this increase, but it does coincide with the global financial crisis and drought conditions," chief executive Neil Cassidy said.
Tasplan is not the only fund upping its involvement with suicide awareness.
Last year, a joint initiative by Lifeline Australia and the MTAA Superannuation Fund won an Australian Safer Communities Award for its ReadtheSigns campaign. The campaign is aimed at promoting help-seeking and suicide prevention among members of MTAA Superannuation and employers in the motor trades.
And now a major research project backed by a number of not-for-profit funds will aim to identify the real costs of suicide and its implications for insurance claims.
SuperFriend, the Industry Funds Forum Mental Health Foundation, is developing a major data collection research project in 2010 that will identify suicide, temporary and permanent disability and income protection claim statistics relating to mental illness and suicide within participating super funds.
SuperFriend manager Antonella Hellier wrote in a column for Investor Weekly that intitial data prepared for SuperFriend by Industry Fund Services Insurance Broking illustrated that deaths by suicide on average accounted for 9 per cent of all death claims between 1993 and 2007 with an average claim payment of $60,733.
"Suicide has a profound effect on our society, with a significant ripple effect for those surrounding such a human tragedy - families, individuals, workplaces and communities. It is important to acknowledge that while we seek to understand the economic impact of suicide, the enormous social and personal impact of suicide cannot be understated," Hellier said.
