World Health Organization did not produce suicide count after Trump’s victory

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) to connect with a trained counselor.

Former President Donald Trump has been named president-elect following the Nov. 5 election. The decisive win in a deeply politically divided country fueled celebration on the right and expressions of despair on the left.

But some social media users claimed scores of people were taking the news especially hard: "2,038 suicides have been reported today following Donald Trump’s election win," a Nov. 7 Instagram post read.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

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We saw this claim posted Nov. 6 on X by "Dom Lucre," an account that has spread misinformation before. The user attached a photo attributing the data to the World Health Organization’s program for suicide prevention. 

In an email, the World Health Organization told PolitiFact the claim is incorrect, and that it has no daily suicide tracker. The agency said it tracks mortality data by compiling annual mortality data reports from member states’ civil registration and vital statistics systems.

The latest data in the World Health Organization’s Mortality Database for deaths from self-inflicted injuries in the U.S. is from 2021. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data for suicides is from May 2024. It reported the following provisional figures:

• January — 4,005 suicides

• February — 3,773 suicides

  Featured Fact-check

  

  Threads posts

  stated on November 12, 2024 in a Threads post

  “It was just Biden and Trump in 2020” general election ballots.

  

• March — 3,998 suicides

• April — 4,104 suicides

• May — 546 suicides

CDC reports provisional data based on "death certificate data received, but not yet fully reviewed." According to the CDC, as of 2022, one person dies in the United States by suicide every 11 minutes, or around 130 a day.

In a follow-up X post, "Dom Lucre" said the statistic came from worldometers.info. When PolitiFact visited the page Nov. 8, we saw the number of "suicides today" incrementally increasing from 1,560 to 1,848 in around two and a half hours. Worldometer attributed this supposed data to a WHO page that cannot be found. It specified no location or demographic for this data.

Claims that 2,038 suicides were reported Nov. 6 after Trump’s election win are baseless. We rate that False.