Suicide statistics

The Chief Coroner releases national suspected suicide statistics each year to help suicide prevention efforts and initiatives undertaken by other agencies.

A death is confirmed as a suicide when a coroner, having investigated the causes and circumstances of the death, find the person who died intended to take their own life. Suspected suicides can be referred to as suspected intentionally self-inflicted deaths.

Data on suspected intentionally self-inflicted deaths reported by the Chief Coroner is available alongside Ministry of Health data on confirmed suicides via a new interactive web tool providing a single comprehensive source of information on deaths by suicide in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Caution: Some people may find parts of this content confronting or distressing. Please carefully consider your needs while using the web tool and reading information about suicide.

Please also refer to our media guidelines on the responsible, accurate and safe reporting of suicide deaths when reporting on the statistics contained in the web tool.

If this material raises concerns for you, free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor, or see other ways you can seek help(external link).

The suicide web tool includes statistics on suspected intentionally self-inflicted deaths from 1 January 2009 to 30 June 2021, and confirmed suicide deaths from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2018, presented by calendar and financial year.

Information can be filtered by gender, age group, ethnicity and District Health Board. 

Previous publications relating to suspected suicide figures are now out of date. However, you can access these for comparative purposes, if necessary.

Media requests should be directed to media@justice.govt.nz and all other enquiries for previous publications should be made to Coronial.Information@justice.govt.nz

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