Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Share of countries that have reported suicide data to the World Health Organization

What you should know about this indicator

Missing data on annual death rate from self-inflicted injuries per 100,000 people, based on the listed on death certificates. To allow for comparisons between countries and over time, this metric is .

Source
WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 26, 2024
Date range
1950–2022
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

WHO Mortality Database

The WHO mortality database is a collection death registration data including cause-of-death information from member states.

Where they are collected, death registration data are the best source of information on key health indicators, such as life expectancy, and death registration data with cause-of-death information are the best source of information on mortality by cause, such as maternal mortality and suicide mortality.

WHO requests from all countries annual data by age, sex, and complete ICD code (e.g., 4-digit code if the 10th revision of ICD was used). Countries have reported deaths by cause of death, year, sex, and age for inclusion in the WHO Mortality Database since 1950.

Data are included only for countries reporting data properly coded according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Today the database is maintained by the WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI) and contains data from over 120 countries and areas. Data reported by member states and selected areas are displayed in this portal’s interactive visualizations if the data are reported to the WHO mortality database in the requested format and at least 65% of deaths were recorded in each country and year.

Retrieved on
March 24, 2024
Retrieved from
https://platform.who.int/mortality/themes/theme-details/topics/indicator-groups/indicator-group-details/MDB/self-inflicted-injuries
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
WHO Mortality Database (2022)

The WHO mortality database is a collection death registration data including cause-of-death information from member states.

Where they are collected, death registration data are the best source of information on key health indicators, such as life expectancy, and death registration data with cause-of-death information are the best source of information on mortality by cause, such as maternal mortality and suicide mortality.

WHO requests from all countries annual data by age, sex, and complete ICD code (e.g., 4-digit code if the 10th revision of ICD was used). Countries have reported deaths by cause of death, year, sex, and age for inclusion in the WHO Mortality Database since 1950.

Data are included only for countries reporting data properly coded according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Today the database is maintained by the WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI) and contains data from over 120 countries and areas. Data reported by member states and selected areas are displayed in this portal’s interactive visualizations if the data are reported to the WHO mortality database in the requested format and at least 65% of deaths were recorded in each country and year.

Retrieved on
March 24, 2024
Retrieved from
https://platform.who.int/mortality/themes/theme-details/topics/indicator-groups/indicator-group-details/MDB/self-inflicted-injuries
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
WHO Mortality Database (2022)

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

First, we organized countries into groups based on geographical regions and income levels, aligning with World Bank classifications. To quantify data completeness, we identified entries with missing information in the indicator. For each grouping, we calculated the percentage of countries with missing data, thus mapping out the distribution of data gaps across different regions and income levels.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of countries that have reported suicide data to the World Health Organization”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from WHO Mortality Database. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-111121/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.html [online resource] (archived on March 18, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of countries that have reported suicide data to the World Health Organization” [dataset]. WHO Mortality Database, “WHO Mortality Database” [original data]. Retrieved April 3, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-111121/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.html (archived on March 18, 2026).

Download

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

Download full data

Includes all entities and time points

Download displayed data

Includes only the entities and time points currently visible in the chart

Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fraction-of-countries-with-available-data-on-deaths-from-suicides-by-income-group.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear