Reporting of Suicide

ABSTRACT: This limited study based on publicly available statistics provides strong support for the belief that underreporting of suicide in Canada may be considerable. If this is true, it immediately justifies a greatly increased effort to refine and upgrade the ascertainment procedures so as to make the recorded statistics of more value in assessing the size and epidemiological relationships of the public health problem. From this study has also emerged the idea that, in any given community, there may exist some “general tendency” to violent and unrestrained behavior—a tendency that influences the rates for both suicide and comparable accidents in a similar direction. To explore this and similar concepts adequately requires greater refinement and reliability of the basic statistical data.