FOI reference: FOI-2026-3524
You asked
Can you please provide the number and percentage of poisoning suicides which involved medication for the last 5 years please?
I have searched both ONS annual suicide reports and the drug poisoning data and cannot find this information but believe you must have it to provide the breakdown by specific medication (as is available in the drug poisoning by substance suicides data).
We said
Thank you for your request.
Our deaths related to drug poisoning bulletin provides most of the information you have requested. The table 'Substances involved in suicides' provides the number of suicides broken down by the specific drug involved for deaths registered in each year 2015 to 2024. Please note that these statistics do not specify whether a substance was medication, prescribed or otherwise and this information is not recorded on the death certificate, from which our mortality information is derived.
All deaths by suicide in England and Wales are certified by a coroner and cannot be registered until an inquest is complete. This results in a delay between the date the suicide occurred and the date it is registered and received by the Office for National Statistics (ONS); for example, in 2024, of the suicide deaths registered, only 38.7% of the deaths actually occurred in that year. As such suicide registration data for 2025 will be published in late 2026.
If this does not meet your needs, we may be able to create a custom output. Information on the percentage of suicides involving drug poisoning along with other special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate).
If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further.
As this information is reasonably accessible via another route, even if only accessible on payment, Section 21(2)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.