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Researchers’ citation

Please cite this page as:

Black, T. R. (2026). El Salvador: pediatric suicide rates, ages 0–19. Retrieved [date], from https://pediatricsuicides.ca/el-salvador/

Author identifier: ORCID 0000-0002-5681-4930
Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22672942

Download the data — every count and denominator on this site, as CSV, with notes.

El Salvador · 1997–2018 · Ages 0–19

Pediatric Suicides in El Salvador

In 2018, about 0.64 out of every 100,000 children aged 0–19 in El Salvador died by suicide. The rate has been going down about 21.5% a year since 2013. 1,820 deaths in total.

FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT SUICIDE RATES BEFORE YOU REPORT ANYTHING!

Suicides are expressed as "# per 100,000 per year," but in some jurisdictions this means that we are converting very small numbers into rates (14/400,000 population, for example). Because of this, small changes in numbers of death can create 'bumpy' rate charts. The whole purpose of the confidence intervals and statistical significance on this page is to help you understand what is simply noise and what may be a true change.

This chart groups age "0-19" suicides, but it's important to note that 0-19 is really not what we are looking at. Suicides under 10 are extremely rare (<1 per million person years), and suicide rates increase with age all the way to age 19. So the "pool" of 0-19 is describing 19 year old suicides (12.3 per 100,000) more than it's describing 10 year old suicides (0.4 per 100,000), by a large margin. It is best to think of the "0-19" number as including young children but mostly being older adolescents.

Be cautious comparing jurisdictions like states or countries; there are huge differences in culture, methods available, ethnicity, poverty, and other variables. It's even been shown that religious coroners are less likely to adjudicate findings of suicide than non-religious coroners!

Media recommendations for responsible coverage - SAVE: Suicide Prevention, Information, and Awareness

Years shown

Sex

Ages

Uncertainty

Show 95% CI

Trend

Show fitted trend

First period

Second period

Value labels

Label numbers

Trend fitted over

Years tested

Comparison window

All data ends at 2018 and should be interpreted with caution in 2026.

WHO grades El Salvador’s cause-of-death data “low”. For the Global Health Estimates, WHO rates a country’s vital registration on how complete it is and what share of deaths carry a usable cause code, then sorts the result into high, medium, low and very low. Registration here is essentially complete for ages 15 and over, so the grade is about how deaths are CODED rather than whether they are counted. A death that was never registered, or registered to a cause nobody can use, is not in the figures on this page, so read them as a floor rather than as a count.

Female: In 2018, the rate was 0.97 per 100,000 per year. The fitted trend has been falling 19.9% a year since 2013 (95% CI −26.7% to −12.4%); across 1997–2018 the model finds 2 changes of direction. Male: In 2018, the rate was 0.33 per 100,000 per year. The fitted trend has been falling 20.0% a year since 2012 (95% CI −24.9% to −14.7%); across 1997–2018 the model finds one change of direction.

Show the numbers behind this view

Latest year available: 2018 (0.64 per 100k/year)2018 (latest year)0.64/100k/yearages 0–19

Year-over-year: −56% (−76% to −20%)Year-over-year−56%95% CI −76% to −20%2017: 1.47 per 100,000

2018 vs its trend: −48% (−70% to −7%)2018 vs its trend−48%95% CI −70% to −7%The trend through 2017 predicted 1.22 per 100,000

Highest year on record: 1997 (5.01 per 100k/year)Highest year on record5.01/100k/year1997

Human-reviewed8 September 2026review process vetting-v1

Every page on this site was looked at by me, one at a time, before it was published. This is exactly what that involved, and what it did not.

What I checked

The numbers, year by year: deaths and the population they are counted against, from the file the page is built from.
That the arithmetic agrees with itself. A rate equals its deaths over its person-time, every interval contains the rate it belongs to, the sexes add up to the combined figure, and no year appears twice or goes missing. These are checked by machine on every build, and I read what it reports.
The case definition and the age band, against what the source publishes, and whether either changes part-way through the series.
The source, its link and the date it was retrieved.
Every chart view the page offers, drawn, and read.
WHO's own grade for the country's cause-of-death data, where there is one, and whether the page reads more confidently than that grade allows.
The prose, against the numbers it describes.

What I did not

I did not re-obtain the primary source documents or re-key the data from them. Where a national statistics office publishes a figure, this site carries that figure.
This is not a re-analysis. I have not attempted to correct, adjust or model around a country's counting; I have shown what it published and said what I know about how it was counted.
Being reviewed does not mean a series is comparable with any other. It means I have looked at it and said what it is.

Automated checks ran over every page and I read their output. A language model was used on some pages to suggest things worth a second look; nothing it produced is published, and nothing it said stands as a finding on its own.

A review is a point in time. If the data behind a page changes afterwards, the page does not ship again until it has been looked at again — that rule is enforced when the site is deployed, not left to memory.