NSW has a clearer picture of how often people self-harm after a new technique tracked down 140 per cent more suicide-related hospital presentations.
While standard diagnostic codes used by doctors showed about 21,000 cases from 2016 to 2020, Grant Sara and his team suspected that was a gross underestimate.
By trawling emergency department records for mentions of self-harm, suicidal, poisoning and other relevant words, and excluding cases that appeared accidental, the researchers uncovered another 30,000 presentations to NSW emergency departments.
