National Suicide Rates a Century After Durkheim: do we Know Enough to Estimate Error?

Durkheim’s nineteenth-century analysis of national suicide rates dismissed prior concerns about mortality data fidelity. Over the intervening century, evidence documenting various types of error in suicide data has only mounted & surprising levels of such error continue to be routinely uncovered. Yet the annual suicide rate remains the most widely used population-level suicide metric troday. After reviewing the unique sources of bias incurred during stages of suicide data collection & concatenation, the authors propose a model designed to uniformly estimate error in future study & which could produce data capable of promoting high quality analyses of cross-national research questions. (100 refs.) JA