The suicide mortality rate is an indicator of psycho-social distress of the population and it is often used for planning suicide prevention strategies and for testing their effectiveness. Recognized sources of error for suicide measurement are attributable to different stages of the production process of official statistics leading to a misclassification of suicide in other concurrent causes.

This study aims at identifying, among the set of concurrent causes of death, those that are more prone to mask suicide and how they might potentially impact on the national suicide death rates.

By means of an analysis of the age distribution similarity, the concurrent causes more likely to mask suicide have been identified in: accidental and undetermined hanging/strangulation/suffocation, contact with sharp object, fall from high, jumping or lying before moving object. Under the assumption that these causes entirely mask suicide cases, the number of suicide deaths captured by Italian official statistics accounts for 85% of the estimated figure. The comparison with some other European countries showed that this value is very similar to the one of UK (84%) and lower than those observed for France (96%), Germany (91%) and Spain (89%).