Misleading figures on New Zealand youth suicide rates
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Unsplash / Traveler Geek
Last week, a UNICEF report grabbed headlines with claims that our youth suicide rate was three times higher than the international average for high-income countries.
Two researchers from the University of Auckland, who are experts in youth mental health, say that figure is wrong.
The global charity's report on child wellbeing came out last Wednesday, with New Zealand ranking the lowest of 36 countries for mental wellbeing.
The graph attracting the most attention was the one on youth suicide rates, in which New Zealand outranked all other countries, with a rate of 17.1 per 100,000 15-to-19-year-olds.
"This is our whole world, this research, so we know what the data looks like for New Zealand," associate professor Sarah Hetrick told
The Detail
.
"We just knew when we saw it that it wasn't correct."
The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice collectively supply figures on suicide.
In New Zealand, the coroner must determine whether a death was by suicide, before it can be recorded as confirmed. That's why the
suicide web data tool
displays both confirmed and suspected figures.
Associate professor Sarah Fortune, who is the director for population mental health at University of Auckland, explained the difference.
"The first one is called confirmed deaths, so that tells us that the circumstances of that person's death have been reviewed by the coroner and have been recorded as being a suicide death," she said. "Then we have suspected cases, which indicates that that situation is still open to the coroner."
The UNICEF Report Card 19 analysed trends in youth suicide using only data on confirmed suicide rates.
Because countries have different processes and timeframes around releasing this data, UNICEF calculated each country's average based on the figures from the three most recent years available.
For New Zealand, that meant data from 2018-20 was used and about a third of the other countries were the same, but we did have more recent
suspected
suicide rates. That data said in the financial year of 2021/22, the rate was 12.3.
The most recent figures from 2023/24 showed the rate dropped to 11.8.
While suspected and confirmed rates weren't comparable, Hetrick said the confirmed rates did tend to follow the trend set out by the suspected rates.
Averaging out figures to 'smooth fluctuations' isn't uncommon, so the figures in the report weren't necessarily wrong - but they did contradict the declining rate of suspected suicides during that period.
UNICEF Aotearoa's Tania Sawicki Mead said the report wasn't attempting to make things look worse than they were.
"In order to make a useful comparison between countries, the report uses like-for-like data in order to make sure that there is a genuinely useful comparator about how countries are doing over that timeframe," she said.
"We are really keen to understand what the long-term trends are for youth suicide to understand if what we are doing is working."
Hetrick worried this report promoted headlines and discussion about declining youth wellbeing that contributed to the hopeless narrative, which wasn't helpful for youth who were struggling.
"The risk is that young people particularly will hear wellbeing's not going so great and suicide's going up, and pairing those two things together, as though somehow suicide is an inevitable consequence of poor wellbeing, is a very dangerous message."
Another issue Hetrick immediately had with the report was that suicide was one of only two indicators used to measure mental wellbeing.
"We would very strongly say that, while mental health can be a contributor, that the two things are not equivalent. There are many, many, many more things about a young person's life and the environment in which they live that impacts on wellbeing."
Hetrick said other data, like that in the Youth2000 series, looked at several different indicators that contributed to youth wellbeing, some of which showed things were improving.
"For sure, some things are not as good as they were, but some things have improved, so I think there was a fundamental problem even with using suicide data as one of only two indicators of youth wellbeing."
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