There will be more on this workplace hazard in SafetyAtWorkBlog over the coming months.

It is an understandable response to a workplace suicide to remove the means of others to take the same action. This short-term response has been applied to suicides from cliffs, on railtracks and bridges to my knowledge. Too often this type of intervention has been considered enough. Some argue this moves the suicide attempts elsewhere – the research is out on that.

I have attended at least one conference this year where the occupational doctor for the Australian Federal Police has spoken and the AFP has responded but have not publicised their actions and nor are they obliged to. They, like other police forces and emergency services are addressing this hazard but it is hard and it takes time, partly because of the cultural stigma and the historical inaction on the hazard you mention in another comment. The OHS and HR professions, safety regulators and others are in the catchup phase on psychological hazards and this is not being helped by a continuing attention on the individuals and resilience and mindfulness, etc etc.

A wise person told me only last week that we think that suicides result from mental ill-health but that may not be the case all the the time. We try to understand the motivations for suicide ideation and suicide but we do so from rational thought – we have no option – and the person thinking of suicide may not be thinking rationally. There may not be a reason for someone dying by their own hand, but there might be, and there are dozens of researchers, many in Australia and many with a lived experience, who are looking at the issue and looking for solutions. For years no one was even doing this.

The major principle of OHS/WHS is the prevention of harm and, in relation to your comment, the prevention of suicides. Part of the challenge is that psychological hazards have been largely ignored by the OHS profession, OHS regulators and business owners for many many years. Certainly these hazards have never been more prominent that they are currently.

Safe Work Australia has released at least one guidance recently on how to prevent psychological harm through assessing how businesses and work is structured and how this affects workers. The new international OHS management Standard explicitly lists psychological health as an auditable element and therefore a criteria on which Australian businesses can be judged. That Australian businesses are largely unaware of these official documents is not the fault of the documents or the OHS profession but of the communication structures available to inform the public. I, and this blog, am doing my damnedest to let as many people I can know about this harm prevention information.

Search on “suicide” in this website Keyword search function and you will see dozens of article about the hazard. Search for “Bottomley” and you will find articles from almost a decade ago about some of the very first Victorian research into work-related suicides undertaken by John Bottomley.

To paraphrase part of your comment, “Not enough action is being done” and not in the right areas. The current Productivity Commission inquiry into mental health and Victoria’s Royal Commission into Mental Health next year are major opportunities for all of us to directly affect government policy on workplace and work-related suicides. I urge you to make a submission to them whenever you can.