In New Zealand, a death is only officially classified as suicide by the coroner on completion of the coroner’s inquiry. Only those deaths determined as ‘intentionally self-inflicted’ after the inquiry will receive a final verdict of suicide.
This 2015 data is provisional. The Ministry of Health publishes the number of suicides that have been confirmed by the coroner and also those provisionally coded as suicide where there is enough information to suggest the coroner will find the cause of death to be suicide. At the time of data extraction (29 September 2017), there were 10 deaths registered in 2015 that were still subject to coroners’ findings and where the cause of death was not known. Although these deaths are not included in the following data, some may later be classified as suicide.
