You asked
Could you tell me:
How many individuals were recorded as dying through suicide in the following date ranges please:
- March - September 2019
- March - September 2020
- Of the people that committed suicide, for March - September 2019, can you give me information that you hold about the age and gender distribution of the people that died.
- Of the people that committed suicide, for March - September 2020, can you give me information that you hold about the age and gender distribution of the people that died.
NOTE: If you do not have records for some of the months in the range above, please state that this is the case and why e.g. you may not have received data for September this year.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Please see the following dataset: Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 registrations. This provides annual registered deaths in England and Wales from suicide analysed by sex, age, area of usual residence of the deceased and suicide method.
A monthly breakdown of 2019 suicide data by age and sex may be available to commission as bespoke analysis. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there may be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.
We will be unable to begin reporting on suicide deaths that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic until late 2020 or early 2021.
We produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the latest update including deaths registered from January to June 2020. The publication explains that the majority of suicides require an inquest, where a coroner must investigate the cause of death. The amount of time taken to hold an inquest causes a lag between the date the death occurred and the date the death is registered. We refer to this as a registration delay and registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be five to six months on average. Because our data is based on death registrations, this delay means that most deaths recorded for 2020 so far would have occurred in 2019. More detailed information can be found in the publication.