Under-reporting of Suicide in an Irish County

It is clearly important to have accurate figures on suicides, but official statistics may not always reflect the true numbers of suicides. In this paper, the authors describe how the files of all deaths reported to the coroners of County Mayo, Ireland, for the period 1978-1992 were examined. Those deaths considered to be suicide by the authors were abstracted. Of these deaths, it was found that 7.3% had not been officially registered. The remainder were coded to three different categories in official returns: suicide, undetermined, and accident. In all, 35% of deaths were, in the author's opinion, miscoded or unregistered. The authors compared these three groups on a number of demographic variables with the expectation that if suicide deaths were being miscoded to undetermined and accident, no significant difference would be found between the three groups. This was found to be the case other than for mode of death. The authors found the greatest miscoding was for deaths due to drowning. The authors recommended that changes be made in the reporting and coding system for suicide deaths in Ireland.