When is suicide a public health issue?

On 24 June 2025, the Australian Productivity Commission (PC) released an interim report evaluating the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement. While the PC's recommendations are certainly important components of a robust national strategy for mental health and suicide prevention, they remain incomplete. A more fundamental question is when suicide is even a public health issue. We need to identify what is bad about suicide and articulate why and when it should be prevented. In this article, we will consider three possible approaches to suicide prevention: (1) suicide prevention as the prevention of death, (2) suicide prevention as the prevention of wrongful death and (3) suicide prevention as the prevention of bad death. We will ultimately demonstrate that only the third approach is adequately equipped to achieve what should ostensibly be the goals of a national suicide prevention scheme.