Why the global suicide rate is falling

By E.D.

STORIES ABOUT suicide that appear in the news tend to focus on celebrities who have taken their own lives and on clusters of deaths among students. They miss the bigger picture: that, at a global level, suicide has declined by 29% since 2000. Among most Western countries, rates have been falling for decades. In Britain, for instance, the rate peaked in 1934, during the Depression. But elsewhere, the decline has happened more recently. China’s rate started to come down in the 1990s; in Russia, Japan, South Korea and India rates have all fallen significantly in the past decade. Western Europe’s rate is still declining slowly. America is the big exception: its rate has risen by 18% this century. Twenty years ago, America’s rate was half China’s. Now it is twice China’s. But the net gain is still huge. The drop in the global rate has saved 2.8m lives since 2000. Three times as many as have been killed in battle in that period.

There is no one reason for the global decline, but it is particularly notable among three sets of people. One is young women in China and India. In most of the world, older people kill themselves more often than the young, and men more often than women. But in China and India, young women have been unusually prone to suicide. That is decreasingly the case. The rate among young Chinese women has dropped by 90% since the mid-1990s. Another group is middle-aged men in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, rates of alcoholism and suicide rocketed among them. Both have now receded. A third category is old people all around the world. The suicide rate among the elderly remains, on average, higher than that among the rest of the population, but it has also fallen faster than among other groups since 2000.