Syrian Arab Republic: why this data is excluded

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Researchers’ citation

Please cite this page as:

Black, T. R. (2026). Syrian Arab Republic. Retrieved [date], from https://pediatricsuicides.ca/

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.

Struggling with suicide?هل تحتاج إلى مساعدة؟ لست وحدك.

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.

Help, wherever you are. هل تحتاج إلى مساعدة؟ لست وحدك.
The numbers published for Syria date from before December 2024 and could not be confirmed as current, so none are given here rather than giving one that may not answer. Please tell somebody, and go to your local clinic or emergency department immediately.

Data from WHO Mortality Database (ICD-10), Syrian Arab Republic produce the following chart of suicides 0–19:

Show the numbers behind this view

Year	Deaths	Person-years	Combined	Girls	Boys
1998	2	8,599,838	0.02	0.05	0.00
1999	7	8,738,861	0.08	0.05	0.11
2000	8	8,875,406	0.09	0.02	0.15
2001	4	9,010,391	0.04	0.02	0.07
2002	8	9,142,478	0.09	0.07	0.11
2003	8	9,268,043	0.09	0.04	0.13
2004	5	9,392,545	0.05	0.00	0.10
2005	3	9,517,511	0.03	0.00	0.06
2006	7	9,713,128	0.07	0.04	0.10
2007	7	10,005,535	0.07	0.00	0.14
2008	11	10,198,828	0.11	0.14	0.08
2009	6	10,308,951	0.06	0.02	0.09
2010	5	10,460,555	0.05	0.00	0.09

The published rate in the past 2006–2010 is 0.07 per 100,000. This rate is astronomically low and is part of a group of countries that do not comport with the distribution of rates. If we look at the histogram of rates for age 0–19, and put the number of countries that have each rate, we get the following:

WHO grades Syrian Arab Republic’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 87% complete for ages 15 and over. 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.

Editorially, I have to make the decision to amputate this country from the world’s rates not because its suicides don’t matter, but because there is an issue that makes the statistics of including them in a global database impossible.

I visually inspected the histogram, considered the prior probabilities, reviewed the GHE quality grades for completeness, and arrived at a cutoff of 0.5 per 100k per year. I also ran two mathematical tests, Otsu and a 2-component gaussian mixture with a posterior = 0.5, and arrived at mathematical cut lines of 0.504 and 0.463, respectively.

The rates displayed are implausibly low and this country cannot be included into the global comparisons.

If you are from this country or know more about their statistics, collections, or issues, please email me at dr.tylerblack@gmail.com. I apologize to anyone offended, and I include this page for data transparency.

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.