Nica-May van Zyl
“The small African country with the world’s highest suicide rate”, reads the startling headline of an article published by the BBC in August 2024.
Lesotho is a high-altitude country encircled by South Africa. Its population in 2023 was just 2.3 million.
“According to the World Health Organisation, 87.5 people per 100,000 of the population take their own life every year in Lesotho,” the article reads.
“By contrast that is more than double the next country on the list, Guyana in South America, where the figure is just more than 40,” it continues.
In this fact-check, we look into the numbers and investigate whether Lesotho really has the world’s highest suicide rate.
How suicide rates are measured
There are two ways to calculate suicide rates. The crude rate is the number of suicide deaths in a year, divided by the population and multiplied by 100,000. In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, the crude suicide rate for Lesotho was 72.4 per 100,000.
The age-standardised rate uses a common reference population to remove variations arising from differences in age structures across countries and over time. Age-standardised rates are desirable for comparisons.
In 2019, the age-standardised suicide rate for Lesotho was 87.5 per 100,000, as the BBC article stated.
This was higher than the suicide rate for 183 member states included in the WHO’s 2019 estimates.
Estimates were derived from modelling data for many countries, including Lesotho, which was classified as having a data quality score of four, meaning that “death registration data are unavailable or unusable due to quality issues”.
When high-quality data is not available, modelled estimates are used to indicate prevalence. This approach has weaknesses, but it is preferable to assuming, for example, that there are no suicides.
For this reason, when comparing suicide rates across countries, caution is advised.
Why Lesotho’s suicide rate is high
“The mental health crisis in Lesotho is multifaceted. With the second highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world, mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are abundant,” said Kate Lambert, Executive Director of Help Lesotho.
Help Lesotho is a non-profit organisation that offers community-based mental health assistance and training programs.
Lambert said that many people in Lesotho experience the ongoing challenges of poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment. Due to limited mental health infrastructure, many are unable to access necessary care and suffer in silence. In rural areas, mental health services are either very limited or unavailable, and the stigma around mental illness often discourages individuals from seeking help.
Conclusion
The claim that Lesotho has the world’s highest suicide rate is supported by publicly available data. However, due to data quality, comparisons across countries may not be straightforward.
This report was written by Nica-May van Zyl as part of a mentorship programme by Africa Check, the continent’s first independent fact-checking organisation. The programme, funded by the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF), aims to foster the practice of fact-checking across the continent.
