Suicide: growing malaise among young women and end-of-life - Thinking about suicidal behavior through the prism of age and gender - 6th report / February 2025

Older men more vulnerable to suicide deaths

Often associated with young people, the risk of death by suicide is nevertheless much higher among older people, both men and women: the suicide rate for people aged 85-94 is 35.2 per 100,000, almost three times as high as the overall rate. At this age, men face a risk eight times higher than women, and 25 times higher than men under 25. What's more, their suicide rate rises sharply between 2021 and 2022, from 77 to 86 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
 

A recent rise in suicide deaths and relative stability in hospital admissions

With 9,200 deaths by suicide recorded in 2022, the suicide rate reaches 13.3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, a level three times higher for men than for women (20.8 and 6.3 per 100,000, respectively). With a steady decline since the mid-1980s, the suicide rate appears to have bottomed out at the turn of the 2020s. An initial rise in the suicide rate recorded in 2018 was a statistical artifact, largely due to improved data collection, but the suicide death rate has not resumed its decline since. On the contrary, it is slightly higher in 2022 (13.3) than in 2021 (13.0) and 2020 (13.1).
The number of hospitalizations for intentional self-harm, which include (but cannot be distinguished from) suicidal self-injury and non-suicidal self-injury such as scarification, is stable overall. In 2023, 77,601 people over the age of 10 were hospitalized at least once for intentional self-harm in somatic care establishments, i.e. 128 people per 100,000.

A huge increase of hospitalizations for teenage girls and young women over the past decade

The number of hospitalizations for intentional self-harm has been rising among adolescent girls and women under 25 since 2017, an increase that accelerated from 2021 onwards and persists beyond the post-covid period. 516 women aged 15 to 19 out of every 100,000 were hospitalized in 2023 for intentional self-harm (+46% on 2017), more than four times the rate observed among men (113 per 100,000). At the same time, these hospitalizations fell sharply among women aged 30 to 69 and men aged 30 to 59. Thus, inequalities between women and men narrow significantly between the ages of 35 and 70, while the gap between younger and older women increases sharply.
Among young people, suicide is the second leading cause of death, but also the age group with the lowest suicide rate: 2.7 per 100,000 for the under-25s, compared with 13.3 for the overall rate. Young women remain the population with the lowest suicide rate, although it has risen by almost 40% between 2020 and 2022 (from 1.15 to 1.60 per 100,000).
 

“Assisted death” and suicide prevention: shedding light on the terms and stakes of the debate

For several years now, the issue of Assisted death has been at the heart of public and parliamentary debate. The debate surrounding the notion of active assistance in dying encompasses two ways of dying: assisted suicide and medical aid in dying, otherwise known as euthanasia.  It is not ONS's role to take a position in this debate, but it can help to shed light on its terms: we therefore present a review of the scientific literature on assisted death schemes around the world, which highlights several lessons. The fact that they are open to people with mental disorders raises questions, as the assessment of demand is fraught with difficulties. On the other hand, we do not seem to observe any "carry-over" of suicides to assisted death systems in countries where these have been legalized or authorized by jurisprudence. Where assisted death exists, not all requests for death are successful, and in some cases, the possibility of resorting to an assisted death protocol can make it possible to begin to deal with malaise, opening a perspective, admittedly counter-intuitive, of suicide prevention.

Eleven fact sheets to complete the inventory of suicidal behavior, prevention plans and postvention (prevent suicide among the bereaved) actions

The report concludes with eleven fact sheets written by ONS members, providing specific insights based on statistical results, and documenting measures or schemes in progress or in preparation. They reflect the diversity of approaches possible to account for the suicidal phenomenon, in terms of both data production and support and prevention measures, whether driven by public policies or by players in the voluntary sector.