Chinese students’ suicides in Australia highlight mental health crisis amid ‘extreme isolation’

Police asked the public for more information while the local press indicated it was being investigated as a murder-suicide.

These tragedies prompted the Victorian state coroner to conduct three investigations between 2019 and 2023.

It is the only coroner in Australia with public records on such incidents. The coroner of New South Wales, home to the next biggest international student hub, does not publish such details and there are no other national figures publicly available.

In its inquest into the death of Chinese student Zhikai Liu who jumped from his 21st-floor flat in Melbourne in 2016, the Victorian coroner said there had been 27 suicides between 2009 and 2015.

In its last update in 2019, the coroner said between 2015 and 2019, there were 20 more such deaths, although it cautioned these incidents could still be under-reported.

The work of the Victorian coroner was enough to suggest these issues were not being resolved, despite the efforts of the government and education providers, said Samuel McKay, a research fellow in suicide prevention at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Mental Health.

“While we don’t have data specific to international students, we know that generally across the globe – so that’s both in Western and non-Western countries – there’s suggestions that this is an ongoing issue.”

Gaby Ramia, a professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences who has studied such cases, agreed, saying a lack of data didn’t mean the problems had stopped.

“All we can say is that research suggests that given the disadvantages that international students have in relation to or compared with domestic students, we can probably expect suicides to be greater in their community as opposed