Suicides_Spain

This repository contains the data and R code to reproduce the analyses of the paper entitled "Suicide Mortality in Spain (2010-2022): Temporal Trends, Spatial Patterns, and Risk Factors" (Adin et al., 2025)

Table of contents

• Data
• R code
• Acknowledgements
• References

Data

Sex- and age-specific suicide mortality counts (International Classification of Diseases-10 codes X60-X84), along with corresponding population data, stratified by year and province within continental Spain.

• Suicides_Spain.Rdata

  This .Rdata file contains the following objects:

  • Carto_SpainPROV: sf object containing polygon geometries for the provinces of continental Spain

  • Suicides: tibble object with 10.998 rows and 6 columns

    • Year: character vector indicating the year (2010-2022)
    • PROV: character vector representing province identifiers
    • Sex: factor with 2 levels ("Males" and "Females")
    • Age: character vector indicating age groups ("0-9", "10-19", ..., "70-79", "80+")
    • O: observed number of suicide deaths
    • Pop: population at risk

  Data source: INE (Spanish Statistical Office)

• DGURBA_Spain.Rdata

  This .Rdata file contains a tibble object with 8109 rows and 4 columns

  • CODMUNI: character vector representing municipality identifiers
  • POB: total population
  • DGURBA: classification of Spanish municipalities by degree of urbanisation (1=cities, 2=towns or suburbs, 3=rural areas)
  • Tipo: character vector indicating urban/rural areas

  Data source: GISCO (Geographic Information System of the European Commission)

• Unemployment.Rdata

  The object Unemployment.PROV.S has 94 rows and 3 columns:

  • Sex: factor with 2 levels ("Males" and "Females")
  • PROV: character vector representing province identifiers
  • U.Rate: average unemployment rate (%) between 2010 and 2022

  The object Unemployment.PROV.ST has 1222 rows and 4 columns:

  • Sex: factor with 2 levels ("Males" and "Females")
  • PROV: character vector representing province identifiers
  • Year: character vector indicating the year (2010-2022)
  • U.Rate: annual unemployment rate (%)

  Data source: INE (Spanish Statistical Office)

• Poverty.Rdata

  The object Poverty.TA has 104 rows and 4 columns:

  • Sex: factor with 2 levels ("Males" and "Females")
  • Age: character vector indicating age groups ("16-29", "30-44", "45-64", and "65+")
  • Year: character vector indicating the year (2010-2022)
  • Rate: annual at-risk-of-poverty rate (%)

  Data source: INE (Spanish Statistical Office)

R code

R code to reproduce all analyses presented in this paper, including the fitting of age–time and age–space interaction models using INLA (http://www.r-inla.org/), as well as the code to generate all figures and tables.

• 1_DescriptiveAnalysis.R

  Performs the descriptive analyses outlined in Section 2, including the generation of Figures 1–3 and Table 1.

• 2a_FitModels_AgeTime.R

  Fits Bayesian hierarchical models that incorporate age–time interaction effects, as detailed in Section 3.1.

• 2b_FitModels_AgeSpace.R

  Fits Bayesian hierarchical models that incorporate age-space interaction effects, as detailed in Section 3.2.

• 3a_Results_AgeTime.R

  Performs model comparison and analyzes the estimated rates for age–time interaction models (Section 4.1), including the generation of Table 3, Figure 4 and Figure 6.

• 3b_Results_AgeSpace.R

  Performs model comparison and analyzes the estimated rates for age-space interaction models (Section 4.1), including the generation of Table 3, Figure 5, Figures 7-8 and Figures S2-S3.

• 4a_EcologicalRegression_Spatial.R

  Fits ecological regression model under the simplified spatial+ appproach to address confounding for spatial covariates.

• 4b_EcologicalRegression_Temporal.R

  Fits ecological regression model under the simplified spatial+ appproach to address confounding for temporal covariates.

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by projects PID2024-155382OB-I00 (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER, UE), PID2020-113125RB-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation), and UNEDPAM/PI/PR24/01A (Centro Asociado UNED - Pamplona).

References

Adin, A., Retegui, G., Sánchez Villegas, A., and Ugarte, M.D. (2025). Suicide Mortality in Spain (2010-2022): Temporal Trends, Spatial Patterns, and Risk Factors. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.01342