Suicide - Our World In Data

In many countries, suicides are under-reported for various reasons. A major one is that deaths in general — not just suicides — are not well-recorded in many countries. You can see this in the chart.

It shows that in some cases, not all deaths are registered in a country’s central vital registration system. In many countries, especially in Africa and South Asia, a low share of deaths are registered in such systems at all.

Where vital registration systems are underdeveloped, statisticians must estimate the number of deaths and their causes from partial data and particular studies.

Researchers typically define suicides as deaths that were classified as deaths caused by “intentional self-harm” in the International Classification for Diseases (ICD). This includes people who had self-harmed but had not intended to die, and they may not be considered suicides by the country's particular legal definition.

Self-harm deaths tend to be under-recorded, even among countries that have a large share of deaths registered.6

This is partly because, in many countries, suicide is highly stigmatized. In some countries, suicides and suicide attempts can be a criminal offense.3 For these reasons, suicides may be misclassified, especially as deaths due to "events of undetermined intent", accidents, homicides or unknown causes.7

To account for this, the WHO Global Health Estimates and IHME Global Burden of Disease study reclassify a proportion of deaths reported with those causes as suicides. This is done according to the fraction that is estimated to be deaths by suicide and aims to account for missing data and underreporting.8

What you should know about this data

• This comes from the International Completeness of Death Registration dataset, developed by Ariel Karlinsky.9
• The total number of expected deaths per year is an average of estimates from three data sources — the UN's World Population Prospects, WHO's Global Health Estimates, and IHME's Global Burden of Disease study.
• Many countries' estimates are very similar. However, for others where vital registration systems are lacking or not functional, they tend to differ.
• The level of death registration may also vary widely across different regions within these countries.10