Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2012, 9 1. Introduction 761 It is easy for a well-organised country to measure mortality, including injury mortality, but diagnosing suicide also includes determining the component of intent, which makes it more difficult to have unequivocal statistical data. Given the magnitude suicide mortality and the years of potential life lost, it is certainly worth to learn as much about it as possible trying to overcome the constraints. Suicide is an individual act but once data are aggregated on a country level the changes from year-to-year are fairly small, there are usually no great fluctuations. It is tempting to state that the best predictor of the suicide rate in the short term is the past suicide rate itself. However, in the longer run large changes can happen and indeed have happened. There are not that many publications that attempt to analyse the statistics of completed suicides in the whole world. The main reasons for that are probably the deficiencies in the availability and reliability of data. In 1989 Diekstra [1] published suicide rates in 62 countries in connection with analysing socio-demographic trends proposing explanatory theories for international differences. Out of nine top countries only Hungary and Sri Lanka were not from Western Europe. Due to political changes during the past 20 years the number of countries reporting to the European region of the WHO has grown nearly by half. In 1999 Schmidtke et al. [2] gave an update about suicide rates in the world and reflected this change. The main improvement in data had been in Europe. In 2002 Bertolote and Fleischmann [3] included improved material from the WHO to make predictions about perspectives of suicide far into the future. They followed it up with several articles and summarised their findings in an article about the global perspective of suicide mortality in 2009 [4]. With hindsight it seems that efforts to provide data about injury mortality were stepped up considerably from 2000. Injury mortality includes accidents, suicides, homicides, deaths of undetermined intent and war-related deaths. Reza et al. publication [5] and Krug’s report about violence and health in the world [6] documented the new approach. While a lot of data about injury mortality in the world is still lacking or is of questionable quality and according to Rao of the WHO in 2005 only a third of the world’s countries have complete civil registration systems that yield adequate cause-specific mortality data for health policymaking and monitoring [7], the improvements on 20 years ago have been visible—more countries report data and worldwide estimates are regularly made. The aim of the study is to give an overview about the current status of suicide mortality in the world by gender and age, to estimate its proportion among deaths from all causes and injuries, and highlight the most important trends over past six decades. 2. Methods The WHO includes almost all countries that are represented in the United Nations but there are many that do not report the injury mortality statistics. Current data were available for 105 countries, which was just above half of all. Mathers, himself of the WHO, has in 2005 criticised countries for compiling poor vital registration statistics [8]. Still, there was no better worldwide database for analysing suicide and therefore this was chosen as the only source. The WHO uses definitions in accordance to ICD-10 chapter XX to measure injury mortality, including suicide as a separate diagnostic category. While it was rewarding to use national level sources to gain insight into some special cases, it