ArticleSocial psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology2016
The accuracy of suicide statistics: are true suicide deaths misclassified?
Article in Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- How many people die by suicide each year? Not 727,000: a systematic review and meta-analysis of suicide underreporting across 71 countries over 122 years.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Fatal intentional drowning in Australia: A systematic literature review of rates and risk factors.PloS one · 2020Pooled it
- Effectiveness of Integrating Suicide Care in Primary Care : Secondary Analysis of a Stepped-Wedge, Cluster Randomized Implementation Trial.Annals of internal medicine · 2024Trial
- Suicide Risk and Associated Factors in Patients with Pancreatic Cancer: A Systematic Review.Diseases (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Whose Truth Is Ground Truth?: Consequences of Label Choice on Machine Learning Models Predicting Depression.Research square · 2026Article
- Psychiatric inpatient bed capacity and suicide mortality in Sweden: a nationwide ecological study.The Lancet regional health. Europe · 2026Article
- Impact of legislation of suicide prevention act on suicide rates in the Republic of Korea: an interrupted time-series analysis.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Parental violent offending and offspring suicidal behavior: a nationwide register-based study.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Hidden suicides: focus on England and Wales - comparison with other nations.The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science · 2025Article
- Late-life suicide trends in selected major countries worldwide in 1990-2022: a spatio-temporal analysis from the WHO mortality database.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Article
- Comparing substance-involved suicide and unintentional deaths from 2011 to 2021 in Missouri, United States.The American journal of drug and alcohol abuse · 2025Article
- Importance of variables from different time frames for predicting self-harm using health system data.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2024Article
- Importance of variables from different time frames for predicting self-harm using health system data.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Challenges in the evaluation of suicide prevention measures and quality of suicide data in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: findings from qualitative expert interviews.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Alcohol use disorder and risk of specific methods of suicide death in a national cohort.Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica · 2024Article
- Why Do We Agree to Disagree? Agreement and Reasons for Disagreement in Judgements of Intentional Self-Harm from Coroners and a Suicide Register in Queensland, Australia, from 2001 to 2015.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Suicide Risk Among US Veterans With Military Service During the Vietnam War.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Trends in Suicide Among Black Women in the United States, 1999-2020.The American journal of psychiatry · 2023Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide mortality in Spain: Differences by sex and age.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Article
- Genetic differences between suicide deaths and deaths of undetermined intent.Suicide & life-threatening behavior · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeOfficial suicide statistics often produce an inaccurate view of suicide populations, since some deaths endorsed as being of uncertain manner are in fact suicides; it is common, therefore, in suicide research, to account for these deaths. We aimed to test the hypothesis that non-suicide death categories contain a large potential reservoir of misclassified suicides.
methodsData on undetermined intent and ill-defined death causes, and official suicide deaths recorded in the district of Tel Aviv for the years 2005 and 2008 were extracted. Based on supplementary data, cases regarded as probable suicides ("suicide probable") were then compared with official suicides ("suicide verdicts") on a number of socio-demographic variables, and also in relation to the mechanism of death.
resultsSuicide rates were 42 % higher than those officially reported after accounting for 75 probable suicides (erroneously certified under other cause-of-death categories). Both death classifications ("suicide probable" and "suicide verdicts") had many similarities, significantly differing only with respect to method used. Logistic regression confirmed that the most powerful discriminator was whether the mechanism of death was considered "less active" or "more active" (p < 0.001). Indeed, deaths among the less active group were 4.9 times as likely to be classified as "suicide probable" than were deaths among the more active group.
conclusionsCaution is needed when interpreting local area data on suicide rates, and undetermined and ill-defined deaths should be included in suicide research after excluding cases unlikely to be suicides. Improving suicide case ascertainment, using multiple sources of information, and uniform reporting practices, is advised.
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