PTI
  
Beijing, Aug 25: Nearly 2,80,000 Chinese commit suicide every year in China but experts believe the situation is far worse, the state media reported on Friday.

"The official figure is unrealistically low," said Michael Phillips, an associate professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School said.

Phillips, also head of research at Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, which specializes in psychological intervention and suicide prevention attributed the discrepancy to the lack of a death registry system like many developed countries.

The suicide figures are extrapolated from limited sample data collected mainly from urban and better-off rural areas and do not account for uncounted deaths, Phillips was quoted as saying by China Daily.

The social stigma surrounding suicide, which extends even to the surviving relatives of the deceased, has also proved a barrier to the collection of reliable statistics, a physiology expert with Peking University surnamed Zhang said.

"The current system makes it almost impossible to come up with realistic statistics. Studies of suicide have been sporadic. The first one was not undertaken until 1991," Zhang said.

According to Ministry of Health estimates, there are 25 suicides per every 100,000 people in China each year, compared with 15 per 100,000 globally.

Suicide costs the country at least $3.5 billion a year, second only to the US, according to the Ministry of Health.

A recent report by the ministry on the nation's biggest killers listed suicide just after road mishaps.