Privacy failures driving psychological harm and suicide

Australia’s long-standing failure to protect privacy is contributing to psychological harm and heightened suicide risk, particularly among vulnerable and marginalised communities, writes Gerry Georgatos.

*CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses suicide

IN AUSTRALIA, privacy collapses are not merely legal problems. They are psychic injuries, ruptures that precipitate despair, self-aggression, self-erasure and, too often, suicide.

Suicidality should be deeply understood and disaggregated because it is the direct resultant impact of weak laws and the absence of protections. Suicidality, reducing it, should be a primal motivating force. Suicidality must be a fundamental issue at the forefront of the Australian legal system’s contemplations and deliberations, not just as an ad hoc argument.

In an age where intrusive technologies, digital virality, algorithmic profiling and the mass commodification of personal information have become woven into the fabric of daily life, the collapse of privacy is not simply a dignitary wrong. It is experienced by many as a profound existential harm.

The commencement of the statutory tort of serious invasion of privacy in June 2025 through Schedule 2 of the amended Privacy Act marks a pivotal moment in Australian private law. Yet the tort arrives late, uneven and unsettled, emerging into a society where privacy violations have already wrought devastating consequences, and into a jurisprudential landscape that has never coherently articulated privacy as a right belonging to the vulnerable, the marginalised and the exposed.

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The significance of this new statutory tort cannot be understood without acknowledging the emotional, cultural and psychiatric realities of privacy collapse. The statutory tort, arguably, but in my view, should be understood, when disaggregated categorically, as the disproportionate high rates of people left behind because the statutory tort is inadequate and to the people, the statutory tort effectively holds back because they have no fiscal firepower to afford the law’s apparent protections.

For far too many, there is no access to the law’s available protections. As a suicide-prevention researcher who has spent decades working with suicide-affected families across Australia, including serving as the inaugural National Coordinator of the National Indigenous Critical Response Service – a Commonwealth-funded suicide postvention taskforce – and responding to approximately 60 per cent of all suicide-impacted First Nations families during my tenure, I have witnessed the catastrophic effects of exposure, shaming, data breaches, doxxing, intimate-image violations and institutional intrusions.

My ground-level work with families from culturally diverse backgrounds, including migrant, refugee, regional and impoverished communities, confirms that privacy is not an academic abstraction but a stabilising force upon which identity, belonging and safety depend. Across hundreds of tragic cases, including those involving children as young as eight, nine and ten who attempted or completed suicide, the precipitating or contributing harm was often an invasion of privacy: a personal detail circulated without consent; an image misused; an intimate moment weaponised; or a state agency’s disclosure triggering unbearable humiliation.

Privacy collapses are lived as collapses of self and the law’s historical neglect of this truth has materially deepened human suffering.

For decades before the enactment of Schedule 2, Australia relied on a hodgepodge of statutory and common-law mechanisms incapable of meeting escalating contemporary harms. The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) focused on compliance obligations of “APP entities” and did not provide individuals with a general cause of action for intrusion or misuse of personal information.

The Act’s processes were primarily administrative and conciliatory, structurally unsuited to urgent harms such as image-based abuse or rapid doxxing. Its exemptions, including those for small businesses and employee records, left vast swathes of conduct outside regulatory control. The mismatch between harm and remedy grew as digital technologies intensified the scale of exposure. Image-based abuse proliferated; intimate images were circulated without consent in seconds, and children and adolescents, particularly those in remote communities, became uniquely vulnerable to the psychological violence of online shaming.

According to ABC News reporting in February 2024, suicide among First Nations people remains the highest of any demographic group in the country, increasing despite policy commitments under Closing the Gap, with 238 First Nations suicides recorded in 2022 alone. There were 275 suicides in the following year and I have prosecuted the case that the suicide rate for the First Peoples would rise by 300 per cent since the turn of the century.

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Unfortunately, I have been proven right. These are not mere data points; they are the lived context against which privacy harms escalate distress and heighten suicide risk.

Common law proved similarly incapable of addressing the complexity of digital-era invasions. While breach of confidence expanded modestly, including the recognition of distress damages in Giller v Procopets, its doctrinal structure inhibited relief in cases of intrusion unaccompanied by publication, or publication unconnected to a pre-existing relationship of trust.

Defamation law, concerned with reputation, offered no solace to those harmed by the disclosure of true yet intimate facts. The High Court in ABC v Lenah Game Meats declined to articulate a general privacy tort, leaving the field suspended between moral urgency and doctrinal caution. For more than two decades, courts signalled openness to privacy protection yet declined to fashion one, citing concerns about coherence, overlap, free expression and institutional legitimacy. The result was a jurisprudential vacuum that bore no structural relationship to the lived harms emerging from digital culture.

These harms were not abstract or merely hypothetical. As documented in my Guardian articles, including ‘I remember so many children who have taken their lives — it is a national abomination’, ‘The moral injury of Australia’s suicide crisis’, ‘We cannot look away from the rising tide of youth suicides’ and others, privacy violations were frequently intertwined with the psychological collapse that precedes suicide. In countless cases I attended, an intimate moment was exposed without consent, a juvenile indiscretion was made public, or a personal misstep became viral fodder, triggering shame so acute that life felt untenable.

Among First Nations communities, where intergenerational trauma, cultural displacement and systemic discrimination compound vulnerability, privacy breaches amplified historically entrenched wounds. The Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP) ‘Lost in the Great Desert’ resource on First Nations suicide prevention highlights this interplay: for many First People, exposure and shame undermine social, spiritual and cultural anchors that protect life.

The 2016 InSight+ article in the Medical Journal of Australia likewise described Indigenous suicide as a “humanitarian crisis”, calling for a royal commission and emphasising that structural forms of humiliation and grief permeate the conditions that lead to self-harm. Privacy law’s historical indifference to these realities, including the absence of judicially recognised remedies, contributed to this crisis by leaving the vulnerable without legal language to name their injuries or seek redress.

It is against this historical and social backdrop that Schedule 2 must be understood. The statutory tort’s elements reflect a deliberate alignment with international privacy torts: a reasonable expectation of privacy, a serious invasion by intrusion or misuse, intentional or reckless conduct and the availability of a public-interest defence.

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Yet the statute is intentionally open-textured, requiring courts to shape its scope through jurisprudential development. In this sense, Schedule 2 occupies a liminal space: it is simultaneously “law” and “potential,” both enacted and embryonic. Its infancy demands careful judicial interpretation that honours dignity, autonomy and the profound human stakes of privacy protection. That it honours the sanctity of all human life. I often state that life is a small, brief claim and that everything we can do to protect human life is up to us, to act with rapidity.

I know that I am wounded by the deaths by suicide that have come across my desk, that I have been to their families for days on end. I have had many sleepless nights, staring at the wall, looking at the ceiling, thinking of why children as young as nine would commit suicide. Nine years of age is the youngest recorded suicide death in Australia — three children in three different Australian jurisdictions. One of the families in regional Queensland I supported in-person for six days. It breaks my heart.

The youngest attempted suicide I have responded to, because I was trusted, was that of a six-year-old. It breaks my heart. The measure of a society is often referred to. Not meaning to sound Dostoyevsky, in my view, the measure of a society is how it supports its children. The Australian legal system reflects the people and there is no greater socio-political force than the legal system to ensure protection.

The reasonable expectation of privacy must be interpreted contextually. Courts must consider the vulnerability of the plaintiff, their age, cultural identity, mental health, trauma history, the relational dynamics at play, the impact of digital dissemination and the broader social consequences of exposure. A First Nations adolescent facing community shame, for instance, has a more fragile privacy interest than an adult politician engaged in public discourse.

A child’s expectation of privacy is necessarily deeper, shaped by developmental need and susceptibility to humiliation. The AIPEP resource underscores the cultural gravity of shame in First Peoples communities, where privacy is not merely an individual interest but a relational and collective one. These nuances must inform judicial evaluation of the statutory element.

The seriousness threshold must likewise be interpreted through human realities rather than narrow or mechanistic frames. A privacy invasion is “serious” not only when it results in economic loss or widespread publication, but when it foreseeably causes humiliation, cultural shame, social exclusion or psychological collapse. Decades of frontline suicide prevention work, including my own, establish that exposure often triggers acute distress and self-harm in children and adolescents.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has long emphasised that seriousness should filter out trivial claims without preventing meaningful redress. In practice, the seriousness threshold may become the fulcrum upon which access to justice turns. Judicial sensitivity to psychological vulnerability, trauma and cultural context is therefore essential.

The public-interest defence must be construed in harmony with the implied freedom of political communication. Courts must safeguard legitimate democratic reporting while preventing voyeuristic or sensationalistic disclosures that exploit the powerless.

The High Court’s structured proportionality analysis in Clubb v Edwards and Brown v Tasmania provides a doctrinal roadmap. Public interest must be defined narrowly, requiring genuine contribution to public debate, accountability or safety, not curiosity or moral judgment. A media outlet publishing traumatising intimate material under the guise of “public awareness”, for instance, cannot rely on the defence. Genuine investigative journalism must remain unhindered, but the dignity of vulnerable individuals must not be subsumed under narratives that commodify suffering.

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Schedule 2’s remedial provisions, including injunctions, take-down orders, damages for distress, aggravated damages and accounts of profits, offer courts a suite of tools to address real harm. Drawing on comparative jurisprudence, Australian courts should recognise loss-of-control damages, as in Gulati, and treat urgent injunctive relief as integral to suicide prevention. These remedies must be applied with sensitivity to the speed at which digital harms accrue; in many cases, hours, not days, determine whether a vulnerable person can endure exposure.

The tort’s constitutional vulnerability is mitigated by proportionality. Privacy protection serves a legitimate objective and with careful judicial calibration, Schedule 2 can coexist with political expression. Courts must ensure neither overbroad injunctions nor overly permissive disclosures undermine constitutional coherence.

In its infancy, Schedule 2 presents both promise and danger. If interpreted narrowly, without regard to the cultural and psychiatric realities of harm, the tort risks becoming another technical device that fails those who need it most. If interpreted expansively, grounded in dignity, trauma-aware jurisprudence and comparative insight, it may become a life-affirming legal mechanism that finally fills the void left by decades of inaction. Privacy is not the antithesis of accountability; it is the precondition for psychological stability and equal citizenship. Its protection is, in many cases, suicide prevention.

Australia’s privacy law has finally taken its first meaningful step toward recognising this truth. Schedule 2 must now become the jurisprudential architecture that protects the fragile, the young, the traumatised, the culturally burdened and the vulnerable from exposure that destroys lives. Its early interpretation will determine whether Australia’s legal system continues to contribute to the despair documented across my decades of suicide-prevention work, or whether it becomes a shield against it.

For too long, the law treated privacy as incidental. In 2025, privacy must be recognised for what it is: a foundation of dignity and a condition of life.

I have used my Guardian suicide prevention articles by explicitly referencing them as frontline evidence of the connection between privacy collapse, shame, trauma and suicide. Their insights are woven throughout the introduction, normative analysis and the discussion of seriousness and vulnerability.

The ABC News 2024 report is integrated to provide contemporary abominable suicide statistics disaggregated to the First Peoples, illustrating the structural urgency against which privacy harms operate. The AIPEP ‘Lost in the Great Desert’ resource informs the cultural nuance necessary when courts assess reasonable expectations of privacy and seriousness among First Peoples and their communities. The InSight+ 2016 MJA article is invoked in the historical narrative to demonstrate that long before Schedule 2 existed, the crisis severity demanded systemic structural reform.

Together, these sources deepen my essay’s evidentiary force and moral foundation. We must be belligerent and drive change, correct narratives, disaggregate to all people, shift public consciousness and coalesce understandings. The Australian legal system should be a primary force to this end.

As I wrote in The Guardian in 2019:

I remember a father who found his son hours after his suicide. The father lay his son down and cradled his body through the night until responders arrived in the morning.

I remember the distraught family of a young man who only a week before his suicide had run into a burning house and rescued a young mother and her baby. I remember attending the funerals of three young people in the one community – three burials in five days, three graves in a row.

The youngest was a 15-year-old girl.

I wailed on the inside as I stared at the graves. Weeks later the loss of two more young people would make it five graves in a row of youth unlived.

I remember a father of six children who took his life, a mother of five children who took her life, a pregnant mother who took her life. I remember a nine-year-old child who took his life, a ten-year-old child who took her life, an 11-year-old boy who took his life, a 12-year-old girl who took her life.

Hauntingly etched in my mind’s eye are three children – aged six, eight and ten years – together attempting suicide from a tree, saved by older children.

And, as I wrote in 2018:

‘Recently, I travelled to two island communities that had recorded their first suicides. These First Nations islander communities had been sheltered from the internet and social media platforms where bullying and mobbing play out in pronounced ways. In the middle of last year, both islands were connected to the internet. Before this they had never had a recorded suicide attempt.’

If you would like to speak to someone about suicide you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.