China Suicide Rate?

“I have the official numbers but don’t trust them. Is there any reason I should reconsider this bias?” I would say absolutely not.

The World Health Organization has a publication on Suicide and Suicide Prevention in Asia that you might want to check out.

I was skimming through the pdfs @lillycoyote was suggesting.
Pretty disturbing figures, if you ask me. I’m from Hong Kong and I wasn’t even aware at how prevalent it is in the mainland.

“With 21 percent of the world’s population, China has been estimated to account for 30% to 44% of global suicides (Murray et al., 1996 a, b; Beautrais, 2006).” (p.10 in Epidemiology of Suicide in Asia)

- Suicide fact sheet – this is from WHO
– Injury and prevention in China – note that figures are 2002

@lillycoyote , @lifeflame thanks for the effort, but the WHO article points out that the numbers they use are the official stats from the Chinese government, and the report notes that the quality of the data is poor and likely a gross underestimate.

But you did confirm my suspicion of Chinese data quality. Thanks!
BTW, they guess that the real number is somewhere around 22 – 30 per 100,000.

This means that the suicides of Foxconn workers is actually a surprisingly low number, contray to news reports.

you know, I imagine it actually to be very difficult to gather any sort of official figures, especially in the rural areas. I taught in a village in mainland China for a year, and I can imagine that any sort of reporting of suicides is just at the discretion of the village head. Multiple this by however many townships and knooks and crannies, and its pretty much impossible to get good data.

@arpinum That’s kind of why I posted the link. WHO has analyzed the best data available, pretty much the only data, the official data, and outlined it’s faults. I don’t think there is better data available. You have to judge the quality and biases as they have. Sometimes accurate data on certain things, from certain countries is simply not available.

pretty impossible to get, second only to North Korea.

not bang on subject but might prove interesting http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tenth-worker-at-ipad-factory-commits-suicide-1982897.html

yes, 10 in 5 months, where if they were following the average there would be ~40 suicides by now. Seems like the media is driving this story.

The media is probably driving the story because I am sure that it is not just at Foxconn where workers are unhappy. But I am glad that this is bringing out the issue of suicides / conditions for migrant workers.

Note though that the suicide rate in is “3 times higher in rural areas compared to urban areas (27.1 vs 8.3 per 100 000)” (WHO), which means it would be more accurate to look at the urban average than the national average.