To better monitor and prevent suicides globally, it's crucial to understand how they are measured and estimated by different sources.
Every suicide is a tragedy. To improve suicide prevention across countries and over time, it’s crucial to have good data on suicides.Unfortunately, this data can be limited and difficult to interpret. Each data source has limitations; understanding them is critical to making sense of the available data.In this article, I will describe where global suicide data comes from, its limitations, and how and why it varies between sources.Reported data on suicides comes from death certificates Reported data from death certificates is limited in many countriesReported data on suicides can be inaccurate Even well-recorded data on causes of death is not always comparableHow do the different sources of global data on suicides compare?
So far, we have looked at several different sources of data on suicides: reported suicide rates (in the WHO Mortality Database) and estimated suicide rates (from the IHME’s GBD study and the WHO’s GHE study).The chart below shows a comparison of estimates from each data source.Conclusion
A range of challenges limit global suicide data, and understanding them is crucial to know how much progress is being made against suicides and whether new challenges are emerging.In this article, we’ve looked at data from three sources:
- The WHO Mortality Database, which presents reported data using data from death certificates
- The IHME’s GBD study, which presents modeled data using a range of data sources
- The WHO’s GHE study, which presents a combination of modeled data and reported data that has been adjusted for underreporting
Reported data on suicides can be limited because of underreporting or misclassification in death certificates. In addition, countries can have different legal and cultural practices in determining causes of death, including suicide. Poor medical records, a lack of healthcare workers, and poverty can limit vital registration systems.These limitations affect data from the WHO Mortality Database. Reported suicide rates are likely to be an underestimate of actual suicide rates, and are difficult to compare between countries, which can have different practices and national reporting systems.Nevertheless, the WHO Mortality Database can help understand suicide trends over time in wealthier countries, especially if approaches to measure and classify suicide remain stable.To account for the underreporting of suicides, researchers can use other data sources, such as the IHME’s GBD study and the WHO’s GHE study.But these sources also have limitations: adjustments for underreporting of suicides are based on historical research that may be less valid today.In addition, estimates are partially based on global patterns, and for some countries, there may be minimal information to make estimates of suicide rates and trends.These limitations significantly affect estimates of poor countries, where different data sources can make very different estimates.By improving data collection on suicide, we can improve our understanding of suicide trends globally and, ultimately, save more lives.