Problems with the coronial determination of ‘suicide’

After over 100 years of constant dissatisfaction with the accuracy of suicide data, this suggests that the problem may actually lie with the category of suicide itself. In almost all previous, ‘suicide’ is taken to be a self-evidently valid category of death, not an object of study its own right. Instead, the focus in this paper is upon the presupposition that how a social fact suicide is counted depends upon norms for its governmental regulation, leading to a reciprocal between social norms and statistical norms. Since this relationship is centred almost in the coroner’s office, this paper examines governmental, definitional and categorisational relating to how coroners reach findings of suicide. The intention of this paper is to contribute international debates over how suicide can best be conceptualised and adjudged.