With a suicide rate of less than seven per 100,000, Malta is one of the few European countries with a low suicide rate.

According to Friday’s The Guardian, the UK has seven per 100,000 rate and is higher than both Italy and Malta. Of 30 countries which gave figures to the World Health Organisation, Lithuania had the worst rate at 44 suicides per 100,000, and the lowest number was in Azerbaijan at 1.41 per 100,000.

Europe has the world’s highest suicide rate and it is rising among young people, according to the WHO.

Dr Gudjón Magnusson, WHO director for Europe in charge of mental health, said that Europe needed to lose its shameful record of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 population.

He was speaking at a 52-country ministerial summit on mental health being staged in Helsinki. “There are 873,000 suicides worldwide and Europe, east and west, has 163,000 of those. There are probably 10-15 times that number of attempted suicides,” he said.

Numerous speakers likened this to a hidden repetition in Europe of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami death toll.