Suicides of young people by race

You asked

Please could you provide the demographic data on the racial distribution of young people who commit suicide?

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

Unfortunately, we do not hold information on suicide statistics by ethnicity. The information we hold on deaths is limited to what is recorded on the death certificate by a doctor or information about the cause and circumstances of the death provided by a coroner. This information does not include ethnicity, therefore, this variable is not provided in our annual Suicides in the UK release.

We do hold the country of birth of the deceased, but this is not considered an acceptable indication of ethnicity for most purposes.

However, you may be interested in an ad-hoc piece of analysis we published looking at student suicide using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), which included rates of student suicide by ethnicity:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesexperimentalstatistics/2018-06-25#analysis-on-higher-education-student-suicides-in-england-and-wales

We can provide the number of suicides per year by key variables such as age, sex and geographical area. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). If you wish to discuss your data requirements in more detail you can contact the Mortality Analysis team at mortality@ons.gov.uk.