Is headspace making a difference to young people’s lives?

4. Outcomes of headspace Clients
Figure 4.7 Percentage of headspace clients who considered suicide in the last year, by K10 change
and intervention survey wave
Note: Data for this analysis is sourced from the headspace intervention survey. Estimates of clinically significant change
were tested for the survey data and were shown to align well with hCSA data. Suicide ideation data was specifically
collected within the survey data and is not available in the hCSA dataset. Sample sizes can be found in Appendix F.
Source: Authors’ calculations from headspace intervention survey data.
Figure 4.7 reports the proportion of survey respondents in each K10 change category who had
contemplated suicide for both survey waves. The results reveal two highly significant findings.
First, the propensity to consider suicide falls by more than half among those whose K10 had
improved clinically during their progress through headspace, from 59.2% in the first survey period
down to 29.4% at the second. Rates also fell for those who showed either reliable or insignificant
improvement, by around 10 percentage points and 18 percentage points respectively.
The second significant finding relates to those headspace clients who exhibited no real improvement
in K10, i.e. a change of less than two K10 points between survey waves. Even for this group, the
propensity to consider suicide fell by more than 16 percentage points, from 64% to 47.8%.
These findings indicate that significant change in critical outcomes may occur for headspace clients
at high risk of suicide despite there being no evidence of change in psychological distress through
the K10 measure. The finding is an important one in that it highlights the potential protective role that
the headspace program may have against such extreme adverse mental health outcomes.
The change in prevalence of suicidal thoughts for young men and women that had received
treatment from headspace are considerable, as shown in Figure 4.8. Males appear more responsive
than females in relation to lower rates of suicidal ideation, showing a 41.6 percentage point reduction
in suicidal ideation for those who clinically improved in terms of their psychological distress levels.
Young women in the same group showed a decrease in suicidal ideation by 27.2 percentage points.
For young men who improved reliably, suicidal ideation rates decreased by more than 25 percentage
points and for young women, the response is lower at 6.4 percentage points. The rate of reduction
is also positive across a number of other groups. Young males and females whose mental health
functioning declined reliably and young males whose K10 declined clinically, as measured by
changed in K10 scores, experienced increases in suicide ideation.
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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