Working in mental health research, I am acutely aware of one area where we lack crucial data: suicide. Canadians do not know enough about suicide due to our lack of publicly accessible, up-to-date suicide data. This is a serious problem because we cannot prevent an issue if we do not have adequate knowledge of it in the first place.

To begin, accessing national suicide data from Statistics Canada can be time consuming, expensive and difficult, particularly if you want more nuanced “microdata,” such as monthly suicide counts stratified by variables, which include gender or method. Importantly, this type of nuanced information can be extremely useful for research on issues such as suicide contagion.

Further, the most recent comprehensive report on suicide in Canada was released nearly 10 years ago and has been archived on the Statistics Canada website. A lot has changed since 2009. In fact, recent data suggests suicide rates have increased in youth and women. Although more recent statistics are available through Statistics Canada, this data is relatively out-of-date and does not contain much useful information for prevention.

Using currently available information, I could tell you that of the 267,213 Canadian deaths in 2016, 3,978 were by suicide. I could not, however, tell you about the characteristics of these individuals beyond their age and gender. Did they graduate high school? Did they live alone? Were they socially isolated or living in poverty? What about their race and ethnicity? How many were veterans?

Our inability to answer these basic questions highlights how the wider data gap per se is also problematic for suicide prevention. Much research shows that suicide is multifactorial and complex. This means that there is not one sole cause of suicide. We must consider the wider social and cultural context.

As such, factors such as marriage and divorce rates, (un)employment, wait times for mental health services, incarceration and arrest, and even workplace injury become important in the context of suicide prevention. Linking together basic information, such as education level or ethnicity, with suicide data would also generate a vast amount of useful knowledge; not only about suicide and its risk factors but also other pressing social issues and their outcomes.

Lacking such crucial information makes it immensely difficult to create an effective national suicide prevention strategy. It also limits our ability to develop tailored prevention strategies in specific populations, such as elderly adults, students or ethnic minorities.

Much research highlights the fact that effective suicide prevention strategies must be evidence-based; something we cannot achieve without accurate, timely and accessible data. The knowledge generated by data can quite literally save lives. It is time for Canada to close this gap.