In August 2021, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported suicide by ethnicity for the first time (ONS 2021). However there were a number of limitations in the utility of the statistics: despite reporting white and mixed men, and mixed women, as dying at the highest rates between 2012-19, neither groups were disaggregated so that the groups conflated the following ethnicities from the 2011 Census:
Mixed or multiple ethnic groups
- White and Black Caribbean
- White and Black African
- White and Asian
- Any other Mixed or multiple ethnic background
White
- English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British
- Irish
- Gypsy or Irish Traveller
- Roma
- Any other White background
Perhaps because the white male category was reported as dying at the highest rate of suicide (albeit in the latest reporting period 2017-2019 only), the UK’s first suicide by ethnicity statistics (ONS 2021) have done very little to shift contemporary UK suicide knowledge which casts suicide as a white male pathology.
Three years later, the Bristol Suicide and Self-Harm Research Group (SASH) have published further analysis in the Lancet, using the ONS data to calculate “the age-standardised suicide rates by sex for each of the 18 self-identified ethnicity groups in England and Wales” (Knipe, Moran, Howe, Karlsen, Kapur, Revie et al. 2024, emphasis added).
Their analysis complicates the reporting of white men as dying at the highest rates of suicide:
“In males, the rate of suicide… in individuals who identify as being from a Mixed heritage background or White Gypsy or Irish Travellers… was similar to the White British majority, but in females,
rates were 79% higher in individuals from a Mixed White and Caribbean heritage background, and more than double in White Gypsy or Irish Travellers” (Knipe et al. 2024, 616).
In addition, the majority of ethnic minority people reported to die by suicide were not migrants but descendants of migrants, since “the census is unlikely to capture irregular migrants (eg, those who
entered on irregular modes of entry, or those who overstay their visas), a migrant population who might have a higher risk of suicide” (Knipe et al. 2024, 618). This implies that the high rates of suicide reported among some ethnic minority groups (namely Mixed, and White Gypsy or Irish Traveller) cannot be explained via recourse to some of the arguments often used for explaining migrant suicide (e.g. attributing distress to home countries).
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