Indonesia · No usable rate · What is known about the counting
In 2024 a team led by Sandersan Onie assembled the first suicide statistics profile Indonesia has ever had, out of five separate government sources, and what it establishes most clearly is how little is currently counted. Unfortunately, we have no usable figure for anyone under twenty.
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!
Until 2024 nobody had assembled Indonesia’s suicide data at all. The World Health Organization published an estimated rate for the country and marked it with its lowest possible quality score. The 2024 profile is the first work to go and look, and it did so through a government partnership that opened five separate sources: national police records for 2016–2021, the civil death registry for 2020, the Village Potential Survey for 2018 and 2021, the Sample Registration System for 2016–2018, and the WHO’s own estimates for comparison.
The sources disagree with each other by nearly an order of magnitude, and the paper states so starkly. Police records capture 12.8% of the deaths the WHO estimates for the same years. Put the other way round, the paper reports an underreporting rate of 859%.
The one source that verifies how a person died is the Sample Registration System, which uses verbal autopsy. It reaches 51.4% (95% CI 32.2–70.5) of the estimated deaths, which is four times better than the police figure... but it does so across 128 subdistricts covering 4.84 million people, about 1.84% of Indonesia’s population. It is a good sample, but its not enough to estimate a national sample.
This research team went and did the best they could. What they could not do is provide a usable rate. We currently have no usable data.
Almost nothing, unfortunately.
The defensible sentence is about the counting, not about the children: Indonesia’s first national suicide profile, published in 2024, found that official records capture roughly an eighth of the suicide deaths the WHO estimates, and published no figures at all for people under twenty. This is a country of 280 million people, and we need better data.
Every figure on this page is a count, printed as its source printed it. Nothing here is a rate, so nothing here is pooled, fitted or compared, and the page computes nothing at all. Expand for the full citation.
Onie S, Usman Y, Widyastuti R, Lusiana M, Angkasawati TJ, Musadad DA, Nilam J, Vina A, Kamsurya R, Batterham P, Arya V, Pirkis J, Larsen M (2024). Indonesia's first suicide statistics profile: an analysis of suicide and attempt rates, underreporting, geographic distribution, gender, method, and rurality. The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia, 22, 100368
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lansea.2024.100368Every 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
What I did not
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.
In the US and Canada, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Trevor Project supports LGBTQ+ young people at 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678.
In Indonesia, the Ministry of Health crisis line 119 ext. 8 and Into The Light Indonesia (intothelightid.org) provide support and referral.Disclaimer: The content on this website is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for professional diagnosis, treatment, or care. Always seek the advice of a qualified health professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical or mental health condition. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, help is available now. Call or text 9-8-8 (Suicide Crisis Helpline — Canada & US, available 24/7), or go to your nearest emergency department. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
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