Suicide: Scottish trends
From September 2023 statistics on probable suicides in Scotland will be published by National Records of Scotland (NRS) only. In previous years both NRS and Public Health Scotland (via the ScotPHO website) produced annual National Statistics publications on probable suicides, with both publications based on NRS data and published on the same day.
The latest available statistics on probable suicides in Scotland can be found here: Probable Suicides | National Records of Scotland (https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/). For further information about this data, please contact NRS by email at statisticscustomerservices@nrscotland.gov.uk.
Chart 1 shows trends in age-standardised mortality rates (ASMR) in Scotland from 1994 to 2023, for all persons, males and females. The chart is based on the data on probable suicides released by National Records of Scotland (NRS) on 5 September 2023 (see Probable Suicides). The largest ASMR for all persons over the period shown in Chart 1 (1994 to 2023) was 17.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 2002. Since then, the rate of suicide has generally decreased. The male suicide ASMR rose to 28.0 deaths per 100,000 population in 2000 and has since decreased, while for females the ASMR has decreased from 9.1 deaths per 100,000 population in 2011 to 7.1 per 100,000 in 2023.
For background information on the use of European age-standardised rates (EASR), rebased populations and coding changes, please see Suicide Statistics for Scotland: Update of trends to 2021 - Technical Paper (439Kb). Also, it should be noted that in 2009 NRS changed how it obtains information about the nature of death. Since then, there has been a large increase in the percentage of poisoning deaths described as accidental, and a fall in those described as being due to events of undetermined intent. This contributed to the fall in recent years in the number of probable suicides. More information about this is available on the NRS website.
