By: Ranjini K
March 11 2021
Partly True: Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in the world.
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The Verdict Partly_True
In 2016, Lithuania had 32 cases of suicide per 100,000 residents. The data for 2020 is unavailable.
Claim ID 375159a5
In 2016, Lithuania had 32 cases of suicide per 100,000 residents. The data for 2020 is unavailable.According to Statista, Lithuania has a persistently high suicide rate with 32 cases in 2016 — higher than countries such as Russia (32) and Guyana (29). Most of those who took their lives were male. In 2016, the male suicide rate was 58.1 suicide per 100,000 inhabitants. The female suicide rate was 9.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. VoxEU — a policy portal set up by the Centre for Economic Policy Research — listed GDP growth, alcohol consumption, unemployment, wages, demographics, health expenditure, marital status, alcohol consumption, and climate as possible factors contributing to the high suicide rate. The report by VoxEU added that the number of suicides was highest in the 1990s, when the USSR collapsed, which left the Lithuanians exposed to an unfamiliar social environment. Data is normally only published every 2-3 years. Since the data is unavailable for the years 2019 or 2020, we can only mark the claim as Partly True.