Suicide stats shrouded in secrecy

Still no way for public to know if purported youth suicide crisis is actually real or not

An effort to quantify the number of youth suicides in Penticton has come up short. Following an appeal from The Herald, an adjudicator at the B.C. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has upheld The BC Coroners Service’s decision not to release the data.

To help either confirm or dispel the suggestion that Penticton had been hit with a wave of youth suicides, the newspaper in August 2017 filed a freedom of information request for the annual number of suicide deaths for the years 2011 through 2016.

According to the service, there were no youth suicides recorded between 2011 and 2013, and somewhere between one and five youth suicides each year from 2014 through 2016.

However, the service refused to release the exact values for 2014 through 2016, citing an internal policy that states because the number is less than five, its release could somehow lead to identification of victims and therefore breach the privacy rights of the victims and their families.

That explanation was accepted by the OIPC adjudicator.

“I agree that the disclosure of the total number of youth suicides for 2013 to 2017 are drawn from a sufficiently small population that their disclosure could lead to re-identification of the individuals it is about,” policy director Bradley Weldon wrote in his opinion letter.

He went on to cite a section of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that deals with personal privacy of deceased people.

“The personal information is about individuals who committed suicide, a cause of death that is subject to some stigma in Canadian society. In my view the disclosure of this cause of death could damage the reputation of the individuals the information is about,” Weldon said.

Information provided to The Herald in response to its freedom of information request showed 11 adults took their own lives here in 2016, which worked out to a rate of about 33 suicides per 100,000 per people.

That compared to a national rate of 11.5 in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available from Statistics Canada.