Somewhere in the world, a person dies by suicide roughly every 43 seconds Multiply that across a year, and the figure the World Health Organization gives us is over 720,000 lives. That number is so large it stops meaning anything until you remember that each one was a person with a name and a family. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29 worldwide. For every death, there are many more attempts, with some estimates putting it at 20 or more for every one life lost. This is not a niche public health issue tucked away in a footnote. It is a crisis playing out in plain sight, and most of us are simply not taking it seriously.
What tends to surprise people, when they first encounter the data, is where the weight of this crisis actually rests There is a lazy assumption that suicide is somehow a wealthy world problem, a consequence of loneliness and excess in rich, cold countries. The figures say otherwise. Nearly three in every four suicides recorded globally happen in low- and middle-income countries. These are the very places where mental health budgets are lowest, where psychiatrists are scarce, and where the subject is often too shameful to say aloud. Africa carries a real share of this burden, even though its numbers are among the least reliable in the world. That is not because the deaths are not happening. It is because so many are never recorded as what they are.
The truth is that Nigeria features prominently in this crisis Estimates of the national suicide rate vary a great deal depending on the source and the year. Some put it in the single digits per 100,000 people. Older WHO data using age-standardised methods put it much higher, at 17.3 per 100,000, which placed Nigeria fifteenth in the world and seventh in Africa, well behind Lesotho at the top of the continental list. That range of numbers is itself a warning sign. When a country cannot settle on how many of its people are dying this way, it tells you that the system for counting them, for understanding them, and for grieving them properly is broken.
Suicide remains a criminal offence under Section 327 of Nigeria’s Criminal Code Act, a colonial-era provision which has outlived any usefulness it may once have claimed The government pledged to decriminalise it in 2024. The Federal Executive Council only recently approved an amendment to the National Mental Health Act, but it must still pass through the National Assembly to fully become law. A National Suicide Prevention Strategic Framework, running from 2023 to 2030, has also been introduced. However, a law still on the books, threatening a grieving, traumatised person with a prison sentence, does real damage. Families hide the true cause of death to protect the departed and themselves. Survivors of suicide attempts hide their scars rather than risk arrest.
One widely cited study, based on a decade of Nigerian newspaper reports, found that half of the documented cases were under 34, suggesting that a generation is being lost disproportionately young Newspaper reports are an imperfect source, since they miss cases that never make the press. The pattern they, however, point to fits what clinicians describe: job loss, spousal conflict, untreated depression, and increasingly the sheer economic strain of trying to build an ordinary life with a currency that keeps losing its value and a job market with little room for the young.
A recent meta-analysis pulling together more than 50 Nigerian studies and over 130,000 people found that close to 8% of the general population has experienced suicidal thoughts at some point Smaller, but still troubling, proportions went on to set up a plan or make an attempt. Numbers like that do not describe a peripheral problem affecting a handful of unlucky people. They describe something running quietly through ordinary households, hidden behind polite greetings and the assumption that everyone is managing fine.
Now, none of this happens in isolation from the wider economic and social situation Nigeria’s youth unemployment, insecurity in several regions, and the daily grind of inflation on food and fuel do not cause suicide in any simple, direct way. Human distress is hardly ever that obvious, but these pressures pose a serious risk. They strip away the small cushions that normally help people survive their worst weeks: a stable job, a functioning support network, and affordable healthcare. Take those cushions away from enough people at once and the numbers go up.
Here is where I want to challenge a comfortable habit many of us fall into It is the habit of treating suicide entirely as a policy failure, something only governments and hospitals can provide a solution for. Governments must act. And our own government should move faster on decriminalisation, training more mental health workers, and making care affordable outside private clinics in Lagos and Abuja. However, policy alone will not close this gap, because most of the moments that matter happen far from any clinic. They happen at a family dinner table, in a WhatsApp thread that goes quiet, in a colleague who stops laughing at the usual jokes, and in a friend who cancels plans for the third week running. This is where personal responsibility comes in. It is not blame directed at anyone who has struggled or died. It is an honest reckoning with what each of us owes the people around us.
That responsibility looks quite ordinary in practice It means noticing when someone close to you withdraws and asking directly rather than assuming they would prefer to be left alone. It means taking a friend’s throwaway comment about not wanting to be here seriously, rather than laughing it off. If you are struggling yourself, it means resisting the cultural instinct to carry it silently until it becomes unbearable and instead telling one person—a pastor, an imam, a doctor, a sibling, or anyone—before the crisis point rather than after. It means employers building workplaces where a request for help is not interpreted as a weakness. It means journalists reporting on suicide responsibly, without describing methods or sensationalising the act, because how we talk about this publicly shapes how safely people can discuss it privately. None of these things requires a budget line or an act of the National Assembly. They require attention and the will to act on what we notice.
The truth is that the rising suicide numbers are not an abstraction happening somewhere else They are unfolding in families down the road, offices, lecture halls, and market stalls across cities, villages, and every town in between. Fixing the system is necessary and overdue. However, we need to individually commit to checking on the people we love a little more closely and to saying something the next time our instinct nudges us that something is wrong.
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, help is available In Nigeria, the Suicide Research and Prevention Initiative (SURPIN) helpline can be reached toll-free on 0800 078 7746, and the national emergency number 112 is available around the clock. You do not have to carry this burden alone.
Ojenagbon, a health communication expert and certified management trainer, lives in Lagos