Measuring an Aspect of the Distribution of Mental Health: Suicide in Australia 1907-2003 Working Paper Series WP2006.9

The authors argue from welfare economics there is a legitimate economic justification for governments to be concerned with suicide. However, the purpose of this paper is to show the usefulness of employing an alternative measure of suicide – potential years of life lost – rather than a count of the number of suicides. It is demonstrated that the measure of potential years of life lost enables not only characteristics of the location (such as the mean) to be calculated, but also various characteristics of dispersion (such as the standard deviation, the coefficient of variation) to be determined. The empirical part of the paper provides Australian data for 1907-2003 with particular attention to measures of the statistical distribution of age at death by suicide. (77 refs.)

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