The burden of disease concept represents the impact of living with illness and injury and dying prematurely. Suicide is a serious public health problem. Several research studies on suicidal behaviour have reported that suicide is a major or one of the leading causes of mortality at all ages. Suicide mortality has been found to be variable across locations, between sexes, and between age groups.

Each year worldwide approximately one million people die of suicide, 10-20 million attempt suicide, and 50-120 million are profoundly affected by the suicide or attempted suicide of a close relative or associate.

Watch the video below to get an overview of the global burden of Self-harm/ Suicide.

More than half of the global suicides occur in the South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions. Suicide is among the leading causes of death in many South- East Asian countries.

The suicide mortality rates (age standardized, per 100, 000 people) for the member states in the South East Asia region have been presented below. The data is from the Global Burden of Disease study. There is considerable variation in the suicide mortality rates across the different countries in the region. The reported mortality rates are lowest for Indonesia and highest for Sri Lanka. Four countries (DPR Korea, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka) in the region have the suicide mortality rate in double digits. The rest (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Thailand and Timor Leste) have a suicide mortality rate between the range 3.12- 10 per 100, 000 people.

The graph below illustrates change in suicide mortality rate (age standardised, per 100, 000 people) across the countries in the South East Asia region between the period 1990-2017.

Overall, there has been a steady decline in suicide mortality rate for most of the countries in South East Asia region. Sri Lanka has had the highest suicide mortality rate in the region over the years while the suicide mortality rates have been lowest for Indonesia. Before peaking towards the end of the last century, the suicide mortality rates have declined sharply in Sri Lanka.

The rates are presented as the annual number of deaths from suicide per 100,000 people