R U OK If You’re Not White? The Racialised Reality Of Suicide In Australia

Every September, Australia speaks in slogans. World Suicide Prevention Day brings sombre press releases, R U OK? Day floods our feeds with bright yellow graphics and gentle imperatives to "check in". Offices hold morning teas, broadcasters read out helplines, and for a moment, the country performs fluency in the language of simplified care.

But for many of us, that language doesn’t translate. I don’t mean that literally — though interpreters are often missing in crisis care — I mean culturally. R U OK? was designed to be simple, universal, and disarming. Yet for a vast majority of the country's population, it can feel alien, even absurd. In some cultures, asking, “Are you okay?” is either taboo or rhetorical. In others, survival requires masking the truth so deeply that an answer will always be, “Yes”, even when the reality is no.

Behind all the hashtags and ribbons, the statistics tell a brutal truth. Far from being safe for everyone, suicide in Australia is a racialised crisis. In 2023, for example, suicide rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people skyrocketed to 30.8 per 100,000, the highest ever recorded, while the rate for other Australians held at 11.8. We’re talking nearly three times the risk. Even more starkly, suicide is now the leading cause of death for Indigenous youth. These aren’t abstract numbers; they mean community members, siblings, and children are dying daily. And for the rest of those with coloured skin? A recent study found that about 359 people from migrant backgrounds die by suicide in Australia each year, roughly 12% of all suicides. Embedded in that figure are people like me: young South Asians, Africans, Pasifika kids, and so many more. The report even flags that African Australian women and young Pasifika people are especially vulnerable. Yet their names rarely make headlines.

The reality is that this catastrophe has deep roots. Experts point to exactly what we know: Australia’s history of colonisation and ongoing racism. As Professor Pat Dudgeon notes, the rising First Nations suicide rate is “a clear indication of the deep-rooted impacts of colonisation, intergenerational trauma and ongoing social disadvantage”. And it isn’t just history, it’s now. After the Voice to Parliament referendum, calls to the Aboriginal crisis hotline 13YARN jumped 50%, many callers explicitly citing racism as their anguish. Research shows that people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities often avoid seeking help until it’s critical. Psychological and social service support offices rarely look or speak the vernacular; the forms don’t translate our lived experiences. Stigma and strange encounters with health workers who don’t understand our trauma teach us not to ask for help.

Just weeks ago, thousands marched through Melbourne and Sydney chanting for a “white Australia” and railing against the so-called invasion of immigrants. Protestors held placards declaring, “Australia for the white man.” Criminologist Liam Gillespie put it plainly: when people march under a banner of patriotism while shouting “white man”, we see exactly what they mean. These weren’t fringe incidents, they led the nightly news. And when whole crowds are chanting that people like you don’t belong here, how could it ever feel safe to admit you’re not okay?

I speak from experience. I’ve navigated the mental health system as a brown woman too often. After my first suicide attempt at 14, I ended up in a public hospital with trembling limbs and a noose of guilt tightening my chest. A nurse held my hand and asked in a gentle voice, “Are you okay, love?” — not noticing my skin was brown, or hearing the subtext of my silence. I said, “I’m fine,” even though part of me was already gone. In therapy later, the ward counsellor nodded sympathetically as I spoke of feeling invisible in my own life, but I could see she was almost bored; she knew nothing of my culture or my fear that my suffering wasn’t worth delaying life for. I’ve waited months on subsidised waiting lists just to see a psychologist who wasn’t just a mirror of my internalised racism and inner-city white shame. Meanwhile, horror stories spread in my community: a Vietnamese-Australian friend was told by a psychiatrist, “You’re just dealing with normal immigrant stress, have you tried talking to your parents?” I mask a lot. I smile at casual racism, dress to blend in. I hide the depth of my despair because I learned early on that suffering coloured folks is still “someone else’s problem.”

What does R U OK? Day look like for our communities? Often, it looks performative. Corporate offices send out glittering heart-shaped flyers; even politicians flip the script on the day. But this crisis has already hit and there’s no language access, no rush of services, no funds injected for specialised care. Meanwhile, the racist climate is only growing colder. Recently, neo-Nazis at the anti-immigration rally in Perth were not arrested for chanting, “Hail Australia”, as it wasn’t illegal yet. On social media, I see youth of colour quietly say, “If I say I’m not okay, they’ll think I’m ungrateful.” So we hide. We are tired.

Still, I write this because I know what’s at stake. If racism in this country keeps rising — in our streets, in our policies, in our workplaces — then suicide rates in our communities will rise with it. There’s no mystery here. Racism isolates, humiliates, and erodes every protective factor we cling to. You can’t tell people they don’t belong and then be surprised when they stop wanting to live.

Imagine if the campaign meant more than a ribbon. Imagine if every “are you okay?” came with concrete care: interpreters on call, subsidised therapy in every suburb, mandatory cultural-competency training, and real investment in Indigenous and migrant-led programs. Experts have already spelled it out: suicide prevention has to be culturally grounded, co-designed, and funded properly. If that happened, every immigrant mother, every First Nations schoolgirl, every refugee teenager could see a counsellor who gets them before they hit breaking point.

Until then, the truth is this: I’m not okay, and I’m not alone. None of us are, when racism is tightening around and sucking the life out of us. Every protest chant that tells us we don’t belong, every workplace that erases us, every government that drags its feet on funding culturally safe care chips away at our survival. And unless this country is willing to name that, suicide rates in our communities will keep climbing.

One day, if Australia decides to back its slogans with real action, to dismantle the racism baked into our systems and actually build care that includes us, maybe I’ll be able to answer differently. Until then, I’ll keep speaking up. Because asking is easy. But listening, and acting on the truth that racism is costing lives, is the only thing that will actually save them.