Suicide Rate by Country

• Greenland records the highest age-standardized suicide rate in the dataset, about 59.6 per 100,000 people in 2021.
• The lowest recorded rates sit near 1 per 100,000, but those figures are shaped heavily by underreporting and how deaths are classified, not just by lower risk.
• Greenland's rate is more than six times the global average of roughly 9.5 per 100,000, and nearly double the next-highest country.
• In every country here, the recorded rate is higher among men than women, by about three and a half times on average.

The figure ranked here is the age-standardized suicide mortality rate: the number of deaths attributed to suicide per 100,000 people, weighted to a common age structure so countries with older or younger populations can be compared fairly. The 2021 values come from the Global Burden of Disease study run by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with earlier figures drawn from the World Health Organization's Global Health Observatory. A higher rate means more recorded deaths relative to population, not that a country is failing in some moral sense.

Across the 202 countries and territories, the typical country sits near 8 per 100,000, and most cluster in the high single digits. The recorded values stretch from under 1 per 100,000 at the low end up to Greenland at the top, with the rest of the world falling between. That spread is wide, but as the next section explains, part of it reflects how differently countries record these deaths in the first place.

The instinct with any ranking is to read the bottom as the safest place, but recorded suicide rates resist that reading. The World Health Organization is direct about it: because of the stigma surrounding suicide and the fact that suicidal behavior is criminalized in some countries, "under-reporting and misclassification are greater problems for suicide than for most other causes of death." A cluster of countries record rates near 1 per 100,000, but a very low number can mean a death was recorded as undetermined, accidental, or of unknown cause rather than that the event did not happen.

That is why the map is partly a reporting map. Where death-registration systems are incomplete or where strong stigma discourages an accurate record, the recorded figure drifts below the true one, and the gap is largest in exactly the places with the fewest forensic resources. The two leading data series even diverge by design: the modeled Global Burden of Disease estimates and the WHO's underreporting-adjusted figures answer the same question with different methods.

A second clue sits inside the numbers themselves. If recorded rates simply tracked mental-health burden, depression prevalence would explain most of where they are high, yet across these countries depression prevalence accounts for only a small share of the variation in recorded suicide rates. The recorded toll reflects how a death enters the record as much as the underlying risk, so the comparison is best read as a starting point for questions, not a settled league table.

One value breaks away from the rest. Greenland's recorded rate of about 59.6 per 100,000 is more than six times the global average and nearly double the second-highest figure, recorded in Guyana. No other country sits close, and the distance between Greenland and second place is wider than the entire recorded rate of most countries in the dataset.

The public-health literature treats this as a structural story rather than a mysterious one. Researchers tie the high rate to the rapid social change of the 20th century, when modernization displaced traditional Inuit livelihoods, alongside the erosion of community continuity and persistent gaps in mental-health service access across a small, remote population, with young men the most affected group. The same research notes a measurement wrinkle: because Greenland is a Danish territory, its figures are often folded into Denmark's in international tables, which can hide the scale entirely.

It is worth stating plainly, because the number is heavy: suicide is preventable, and the WHO emphasizes that "with timely, evidence-based and often low-cost interventions, suicides can be prevented." Effective help and crisis support exist, and reducing the suicide rate is the single mental-health target in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Greenland's figure marks where that work is most urgent, not where a population is somehow different in kind.

The most consistent pattern in the data is also the least surprising once you see it. Across all 202 countries, the recorded rate among men averages close to 15 per 100,000, roughly three and a half times the average among women. In not one country in this dataset does the recorded female rate exceed the male rate, a pattern Our World in Data finds in the same direction across its own country comparison.

What varies is the size of the gap, not its direction. The ratio runs from about three to one in Greenland up to roughly five to one in Lithuania and Guyana, shaped by differences in help-seeking norms, service access, and the social and economic stressors men face in different places. WHO's broader estimates do flag a small set of countries where the female rate is higher, so this is best read as the rule in this dataset rather than an unbreakable law.

The chart makes the pattern visible: each country is a point, its male rate on the vertical axis and its female rate on the horizontal, and every point sits above the diagonal where the two would match. Read alongside the reporting caveats, even this robust pattern carries the same reminder, that a recorded rate is a measured and registered number, and the work behind the ranking is to record it accurately and to act on it.