Monitoring and sharing suicide data and statistics

The timely registration and regular monitoring of suicide data form the backbone of any suicide prevention efforts and national suicide prevention strategies. Doing so provides essential information for understanding the scope of the problem so that interventions can be tailored to meet the needs of populations.

WHO's annual World Health Statistics report monitors health for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which include suicide estimates (3.4.2 as the only indicator of mental health) from the WHO Global Health Estimates. The WHO Global Health Estimates provide comprehensive and comparable estimates of mortality (including suicide) and morbidity for the world, WHO regions, and countries. The estimates pertaining to suicide are accessible on the WHO Global Health Observatory.

The WHO Mortality Database is a compilation of mortality data as reported annually by Member States from their civil registration and vital statistics systems. These mortality data are used as an input for the WHO Global Health Estimates. Based on the WHO Global Health Estimates, WHO published Suicide worldwide in 2021: Global Health Estimates to provide essential information on suicide across countries and WHO regions.

Prior to this, WHO published its first world suicide report Preventing suicide: a global imperative to increase the awareness of the scale and public health significance of suicide and suicide attempts worldwide.

Quality of suicide mortality data varies globally. Of the 183 WHO Member States for which estimates were made for the year 2021, 86 have good-quality (labelled as high and medium quality) vital registration data that can be used directly to estimate suicide rates.