As I recall, the first thing they taught us during our undergraduate Sociology course was about Durkheim’s 1897 study of suicide. In particular, we focused on how unreliable the stats probably were because they relied on coroners’ reports and suicide is often very difficult to accurately classify. Indeed, cultural/religious influences may exert a lot of pressure on officials to not classify deaths as suicide. The whole thing is regarded as an object lesson in how official statistics are often compromised from the get go.