Does drought cause suicide - No statistical evidence to suggest that at all

Every day in the newspapers and on talk back radio there are tales of suicide in rural Australia due to the drought. These claims seem to be accepted as facts, rather than being challenged.

I would have thought that if drought was causing increased suicides we would see them in the ABS causes of death statistics in those drought years.

So I pulled out my trusty stats, and, using Dubbo average rainfall from the BOM as a proxy for drought, looked for drought years. I have defined drought years as daily average rainfall that is 2 Standard Deviations from the 30 year average. This produced the following list of drought years, and the equivalent difference from the 30 year average suicide rate (which is 12 per 100,000 people). Suicide rate was from the ABS causes of death release

So based on my analysis, I have drought years being 1982, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2018. These years (googled) all appear to have been classified as drought.
So if I run a regression on this to see what the trends are, I get the following stats.

So what does this say. Well, there is no statistical increase from the 30 year average suicide rate in drought years. If anything, both the trend and the drought affect seem to reduce the suicide rate, not increase it.

So can we stop this "drought causes suicide" line please? It doesn't.