Rates of suicide among men are about four times higher than those for women, a major report has found.
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An average of 2000 people in Australia have died from suicide each year since the mid-1980s, according to an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report released on Wednesday.
The report revealed suicide death rates for men fluctuated at about 20 deaths for 100,000 people between 1921 and 2010 while rates for women were about five deaths per 100,000 people per year for most of the period.
However rates of hospitalisation from intentional self-harm were almost 40 per cent higher for women than men between 1999-2000 and 2010-11, with female cases outnumbering males cases most markedly in the teenage years.
The research also revealed suicide rates tended to increase with the remoteness of where a person lived and suicide rates for Indigenous people were about twice as high as the rest of the Australian population between 2007-08 and 2010-11.
Only New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT recorded age-adjusted suicide rates lower than than national rate of 10.1 deaths per 100,000 people. The Northern Territory had the highest jurisdiction-specific rate at 18.1 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.
The report revealed suicides in Australia peaked in 1997 and 1998 when there were more than 2600 deaths.
Since the turn of the century, more than 20,000 Australians have been admitted to hospital each year as a result of intentionally self-inflicted injuries.
AIHW spokesman Professor James Harrison said a lot of weight was placed on suicide statistics as a reason to invest in prevention programs.
"Also those same statistics are often referred to as people attempt to derive from those statistics indications of whether some program or another is being effective in terms of suicide prevention," he said.
"One of the things I think this sort of report does is provide some further information into what's going on, what are some of the underlying drivers of variation in these statistics which can help to both guide policy, priority settings but can also help people to avoid misinterpreting variations in the trends."
