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Suicide in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news coverage of suicide from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about suicide, with its date, location, tone, machine-assigned priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. The dataset measures how much attention the news gave to suicide, and where and in what tone. It does not measure suicide deaths or rates.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, an average of 20.31% of each year's news coverage of suicide was published in August and September, against 16.67% if coverage were spread evenly, and September was the month with the largest share (10.43%).
Basis: Within-year month shares of 213,127 matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Suicide took a 34.8% smaller share of news coverage in 2021 than in 2019 (12.98 against 19.9 articles per 10,000 news articles), and the share then stayed between 13.74 and 14.53 per 10,000 each year from 2022 to 2025.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
August 2019 was the month in which suicide took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 34.24 articles per 10,000, 2.49 times the 2025 annual share; June 2020 was second, at 22.3 per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of news articles about suicide carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 88.7% were negative in tone, 2.64 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.7% of sampled articles carry a label.
Machine-assigned priority ratings placed 93.1% of news articles about suicide at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 2.19 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 25,639 | 43.89% | 3.32 |
| United States | 20,081 | 34.37% | 0.71 |
| United Kingdom | 2,528 | 4.33% | 0.74 |
| Australia | 1,314 | 2.25% | 1.05 |
| Canada | 690 | 1.18% | 0.55 |
| France | 625 | 1.07% | 0.54 |
| New Zealand | 417 | 0.71% | 1.1 |
| Japan | 396 | 0.68% | 0.64 |
| South Korea | 369 | 0.63% | 1.05 |
| Nigeria | 367 | 0.63% | 0.46 |
| China | 316 | 0.54% | 0.21 |
| Switzerland | 309 | 0.53% | 1.22 |
| Germany | 257 | 0.44% | 0.37 |
| Russia | 231 | 0.4% | 0.52 |
| Spain | 217 | 0.37% | 0.38 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "suicide" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Suicide in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/suicide/