Validity & reliability of suicide statistics may be considered at 3 levels: (1) Are suicides mis- or differentially identified across jurisdictions or over time? Suicides are likely to be undercounted; very few nonsuicides are identified as suicides. (2) To what degree are they misidentified? There is no agreement, but some inconsistencies arise from a lack of a standard against which a death certification can be measured. (3) Is the validity of research based upon these statistics threatened?