Deaths of Despair in 27 European Countries and the U.S., 2011-2021

Ronny Westerman's dataset provides standardized death rates for despair-related mortality across 27 European countries and the United States from 2011 to 2021. It uses official cause-of-death statistics and a harmonized classification to compare trends before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data was last updated on 2026-05-21.

Use Cases

• Compare despair-related mortality trends between European countries and the United States based on the harmonized classification.
• Analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on deaths of despair using standardized mortality ratios for 2020-2021 versus 2015-2019.
• Investigate sex-specific differences in despair-related death rates across the 28 included countries.
• Study the evolution of five sub-categories of despair-related deaths over an 11-year period.

Strengths

• Covers 27 European countries and the United States, providing a broad comparative scope.
• Spans an 11-year time range from 2011 to 2021, enabling longitudinal analysis.
• Uses a harmonized classification for despair-related deaths, facilitating cross-country comparison.
• Calculates standardized mortality ratios to quantify relative change during the pandemic.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset is small at 440.1 KB, indicating limited scope.

Provenance

Source

Author: Ronny Westerman. Platform: figshare.

Collection Method

Estimated from official cause-of-death statistics using a harmonized classification.

Time Range

2011 to 2021.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-21 04:38:53; freshness should be verified.

Geography

27 European countries and the United States.