Sri Lanka ranked 4th most suicide prone country in the world

September 4, 2014  

A study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) has ranked Sri Lanka in the fourth position among 172 countries in terms of most suicide prone counties in the world.

The most suicide-prone countries were Guyana (44.2 per 100,000), followed by North and South Korea (38.5 and 28.9 respectively).

Next came Sri Lanka (28.8), Lithuania (28.2), Suriname (27.8), Mozambique (27.4), Nepal and Tanzania (24.9 each), Burundi (23.1), India (21.1) and South Sudan (19.8).

In their wake were Russia and Uganda (both with 19.5), Hungary (19.1), Japan (18.5) and Belarus (18.3).

WHO, which called suicide a major public health problem that must be confronted and stemmed, studied 172 countries to produce the report.

It said that in 2012 high-income countries had a slightly higher suicide rate—12.7 per 100,000 people, versus 11.2 in low- and middle-income nations.

But given the latter category’s far higher population, they accounted for three-quarters of the global total.

Southeast Asia—which in WHO-speak includes countries such as North Korea, India, Indonesia and Nepal—made up over a third of the annual.

Suicides in high-income countries, meanwhile, accounted for around a quarter of the global figure.

The most frequently-used methods globally are pesticide poisoning, hanging and firearms, but jumping from buildings is a common method in highly urbanised areas in Asia.

WHO cautioned that suicide figures are often sketchy, with less than half of those nations keeping clear tallies.

As a result, it said, it crunched a range of data to enable it to craft country-by-country estimates of the suicide rate.

The global rate was put at 11.4 per 100,000, with men almost twice as likely as women to take their own lives.