Suicides broken down by religion

FOI reference: FOi-2025-2860

You asked

I am writing to request detailed suicide statistics for individuals identifying as Jewish in England and Wales, broken down by year for the period 2014 to 2025.

I am particularly interested in:

1. The annual number of registered suicides among individuals recorded as Jewish by religious affiliation
2. Age and gender breakdowns if available
3. Comparisons to other minority ethnic groups and also to the general population
4. I wish to work the relative percentage so if your answers are exact figures are you also able to say the number per e.g. 10,000 Jews or in some way contextualised by relative population sizes.

I am especially interested in understanding how their suicide rates compare proportionally to other minority groups.

I would appreciate it if you could confirm whether it is possible to access annual figures for the Jewish population over the past decade.

Does your data include suicides where people go abroad e.g. to die in Dignitas?

We said

Thank you for your request.  

We hold mortality data which is collected through the death registration process in England and Wales. This enables us to publish regular statistics on suicides occurring in England and Wales. Suicides that occur outside of England and Wales, such as Dignitas in Switzerland, are not included in the statistics. 

Unfortunately, we do not hold the information you have requested. Currently, we do not receive any information on the religion of the deceased as this is not provided by the informant when the death is registered. This means it's not possible to provide regular annual statistics on suicides among Jewish people. However, we have previously linked our ONS death registration data to census data which does tell us about the religious affiliation of respondents. 

Our Sociodemographic inequalities in suicides in England and Wales: 2011 to 2021 release used the 2011 Census and death registration data linked by NHS number for people in England and Wales. We used statistical models to estimate the rates of suicide across different religious groups. People who reported belonging to any religious group generally had lower rates of suicide, compared with those who reported no religion; however, rates were higher in Buddhists and "Other" religious groups. Further breakdowns for suicides among Jewish people that occurred during the study period (28 March 2011 to 31 December 2021) can be found in the accompanying dataset.