An Analysis on Global Suicide Rates

This is an attempt to explain factors that may affect suicide rates, and how both personal, demographical characteristics and environment influence global suicide rates.

Before starting this project, I had some assumptions about what affected suicide rates. I assumed that there would be differences based on age and sex, but I did not know the extent. I also figured that economic conditions may play a role in the suicide rate. Using those assumptions to guide my search for a dataset, I drew from a dataset that combined data across three different databases (sources: United Nations, World Bank, World Health Organization).

Questions

Then, I posed the following analytical questions to help guide my analysis:

1. How do personal characteristics like age/gender affect suicide rates among global populations?
2. What countries and continents have the highest suicide rates?
3. Do socioeconomic factors play a role in a country’s suicide rates?

Analysis

Here are my findings:

Regardless of the time period, the number of suicides by males is around three times higher than that of females. This can be explained through a myriad of reasons, especially given that the dataset doesn’t include suicide attempts. Women may very likely have a total suicide attempt rate equal to or greater than that of men.

The suicide rate appears to be higher when the population in question is older. Age may be a factor in suicide, or at least in the likeliness to commit suicide.

A problem with the data was that it was isolated to the years 1985 to 2016, so when I was analyzing suicide rates by generation, I couldn’t depict the rate differences among generations when they were the same ages. Thus, I only have the tail end data of some generations, and could not directly compare generation to generation (i.e. ages of the generations may be at play and interfering with data comparison).

Prior to 2000, the highest suicide rate is observed in the G.I. generation, also known as those who fought in WWII. This generation experienced the Great Depression, then WWII and the resulting economic and social turmoil (i.e. civil unrest, economic recession) may have affected their suicide rate. Comparatively, the Silent Generation (born 1928–1945) have rates that are much lower even if their age is higher. Generation X and Millenials have suicide rates that have steadily increased over the years. Suicide rates only increase rapidly after the average age of generation is over 20. This may indicate that independence from a familial environment may play a role in the suicide rates of young people.

This graph shows the number of suicides proportionate to the population of a given country. Nine out of the top 10 countries with the highest ratios of suicide are from Eastern European countries.

I saw that the top 10 countries were observed to be countries that have historically had economic turmoil, so I took a look at the dataset to find measures that could reflect the state of a country’s economy. I found that there was GDP per capita, and used that to test my hypothesis:

The top 10 countries have suicide rates strongly correlated with the GDP per capita. The GDP per capita of a country may have a strong negative correlation with suicide rates (meaning better economic outcomes decrease suicide rates).

After my test with the top 10 countries with the highest ratios of suicide, I decided to plot the correlation of GDP and suicide among all countries to see if this correlation extended to even countries with positive or average GDP per capita.

There is a strong negative correlation between suicide rates and GDP per capita among countries. This means that countries observed to have worse economic outcomes are likely to have higher suicide rates. And vice versa, countries with positive economic outcomes have lower suicide rates.

Although most countries appeared to have GDP per capita negatively correlate with suicide rates, some might not. I decided to take a look at the positively correlated countries and those that did not correlate at all.

The above countries had GDP per capita grow in tandem with suicide rates. This graph shows the rate of their GDP per capita growth.

The above countries had positive rates of GDP per capita growth, while their suicide rates also increased during the same time. This graph plots those countries’ suicide ratios over the same time period as their GDP per capita growth.

A few countries did not have any correlation whatsoever between GDP per capita and suicide rates: Japan and Mongolia.

While most countries’ GDP per capita growth usually positively influences suicide rates, some countries still have growing suicide rates despite positive economic environments. This indicates that other factors may still be at play.

Conclusions

Global suicide rates are complex and are affected by multiple factors; the results from this finding are only one facet of this global problem.

From the data, we can’t conclusively say that gender causes differences in suicide rates among these groups. However, we see that men are observed to have global suicide rates that are higher than those of women. Observing suicide rates by age, however, the suicide rates of the elderly are higher than younger populations. This observation may be a result of elderly neglect and ineffective welfare.

While geographic regions may appear to play a role in suicide rates, that conclusion is overwritten by the economic standards of those countries. It appears that GDP per person is more greatly correlated to suicide rates.

Socioeconomic safety likely influences global suicide rates, as we see from the data that suicide rates among marginalized age groups and in countries with poor economic outcomes are highest. To build better outcomes, we need to challenge the socioeconomic factors that correlate to high suicide rates.