The register · Methodology
Methodology
This page sets out the rules this site keeps, how each number got here, and what checking found. Every count on it comes from the files the Atlas reads.
The rules
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Numbers
No ranking and no composite score. Countries are never ordered best to worst, and indicators are never added into one figure. A map layer shows one indicator at a time.
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Stamps
Every value wears one of four stamps: measured, modelled, self-reported or legal. Measured means somebody counted it. Modelled means a model estimated it. Self-reported means a government answered a questionnaire about itself. Legal means it is the status of a law or a treaty, not a measurement.
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Years
Every value carries the year it refers to, not the year the file was downloaded, so two countries on one map may show different years, and each says which.
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Missing
Missing is written "no data", never zero, and never left out. On a map it is a hatch pattern, not a colour, so it cannot be read as a low or a high value.
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Colour
No colour for modelled prevalence. How many young people live with a mental health condition is a model's estimate almost everywhere, and a coloured map would make it look like a count. The modelled out-of-school rate may be coloured, and is tagged as modelled wherever it appears.
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Anonymity
Interviewees are shown as an age band and a UN sub-region, never a town, a school or a date of birth. The age bands are 12 to 14, 15 to 17 and 18 to 19. A country appears only when that person said it could. Names are pseudonyms, and a drawing is generated from a seed and never chosen to resemble anyone.
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Consent
Consent is recorded by month, never by day. Consent is given knowing the page will be public and anonymous, and can be withdrawn.
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Safety
Safe-messaging rules apply to every page: no methods, no locations, no rankings by suicide rate, no language that makes distress sound like a wave or a plague, and help lines beside anything that might land close to home. A content note goes before a story that needs one.
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Sources
Every number names its source and the date it was read. A value that cannot be checked against its source is not published, and a wrong one is corrected or removed.
The ten indicators
Counted from the Atlas data built 21 October 2026. "States with a value" is out of 249 ISO 3166-1 states.
| Indicator | Kind | Published by | States with a value | Years | Age limit | Past the limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suicide rate, ages 10 to 19 a map layer | modelled | World Health Organization | 185 | 2021 | 6 years | 0 |
| Age-standardised suicide rate, all ages on the country card only | modelled | World Health Organization | 185 | 2021 | 6 years | 0 |
| Psychiatrists per 100,000 people a map layer | self-reported | World Health Organization | 146 | 2013 to 2017 | 12 years | 2 |
| Out-of-school rate, lower secondary age a map layer | modelled | UNESCO Institute for Statistics | 186 | 2015 to 2025 | 5 years | 11 |
| Completion rate, lower secondary a map layer | modelled | UNESCO Institute for Statistics | 146 | 2015 to 2024 | 6 years | 42 |
| Learning poverty at age 10 a map layer | modelled | The World Bank | 124 | 2001 to 2023 | 8 years | 29 |
| Corporal punishment prohibited in schools a map layer | legal | End Corporal Punishment (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children) | 198 | none: a yes-or-no fact | none | not applicable |
| Can a young person complain to the UN Committee a map layer | legal | United Nations | 249 | none: a yes-or-no fact | none | not applicable |
| Profiled in Education under Attack 2026 on the country card only | measured | Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack | 28 | none: a yes-or-no fact | none | not applicable |
| WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 country block on the country card only | self-reported | World Health Organization | 0 | none: a yes-or-no fact | none | not applicable |
What each one is, and is not
- Suicide rate, ages 10 to 19. A WHO modelled estimate for 2021, not a count of deaths. WHO publishes no uncertainty interval for this age split, so none is shown. Rates are never ranked here and never appear without help lines on the same page.
- Age-standardised suicide rate, all ages. A different measure from the 10 to 19 layer: all ages, and standardised for the shape of the population.
- Psychiatrists per 100,000 people. Reported by countries to WHO between 2013 and 2017 and never refreshed since. Every value wears its own year, and the layer is off unless you turn it on.
- Out-of-school rate, lower secondary age. A UNESCO model, not a headcount: it combines school records with population estimates. It may carry colour, and is tagged as modelled.
- Completion rate, lower secondary. The share of young people who finish lower secondary school, three to five years after the age they should have.
- Learning poverty at age 10. A modelled combination of two things: children who cannot read a simple passage by the end of primary school, and children who are not in school at all. Each country value carries its own year, which can be as old as 2001.
- Corporal punishment prohibited in schools. The legal position as End Corporal Punishment recorded it in March 2025. Where their table put the entry in square brackets it is marked unconfirmed here, because that is their own word for it.
- Can a young person complain to the UN Committee. Only the states party to the third Optional Protocol to the CRC accept complaints from children, and only after the courts at home have been tried. Chapter 7 of Your rights says how.
- Profiled in Education under Attack 2026. GCPEA profiles 28 countries. This is never a colour and never a ranking: the count is of REPORTED attacks, and a country with no profile has not been shown to be safe. It may be a country nobody is counting in.
- WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 country block. Answers a government gave WHO on a checklist in 2024, read by hand from that country profile PDF with the page noted. A country with no block here has not been read yet; that is a fact about this site, not about the country.
How a number gets onto the map
- It is read from the publisher. From an open data service where one exists, otherwise from the published table or page. The file that was read is kept, with its date.
- It is matched to a country by code, never by guess. Each country name is matched to an ISO 3166-1 code from a list of spellings real sources have printed. A name that does not match stops the build. The current build has no failed matches.
- What is left out is named. 4 names are deliberately not matched, and here they are with the reason for each:
- Republic of Kosovo, in the source "corporal" (1 row): Kosovo has no ISO 3166-1 code.
- European Union, in the source "treaties:crpd" (1 row): the European Union is a party to the treaty and is not a state.
- CHI, in the source "worldbank" (1 row): the World Bank's code for the Channel Islands, which ISO lists as Jersey and Guernsey and not as one state.
- XKX, in the source "worldbank" (3 rows): the World Bank's own code for Kosovo, which has no ISO 3166-1 code.
- A gap stays a gap. It is never shown as zero. Where a source really did report a zero, the zero is kept and marked as reported: Antigua and Barbuda (Suicide, 10 to 19), Grenada (Suicide, 10 to 19), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Suicide, 10 to 19) and Marshall Islands (Psychiatrists).
- An old number says it is old. A value older than its indicator's age limit (in the table above) is still shown, marked "stale" with its age on the country card and in the table. 84 values carry that mark in the current build. Stale means old, not wrong.
- A different kind of number says so. In the out-of-school layer, 41 values are a country's own national estimate and not UNESCO's, and each prints "national estimate" beside it. In the corporal punishment layer, 12 entries are ones the source itself puts in square brackets, and each prints "unconfirmed".
What the last check found
On 19 September 2026 a reviewer compared 50 values for five countries, chosen to span rich and poor (Brazil, Ethiopia, Norway, Philippines and United States of America), against the publisher's own page.
- Confirmed
- 45
- Refuted
- 0
- Could not be verified
- 5
The 5 that could not be verified are all one indicator, WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 country block, which has no values on this site yet, so there was nothing to compare.
The full sheet is in the repository under data/verification. A sample is not a census: it cannot show that every other value is right.
What the checking caught
Four things looked finished and were not.
- The age limit was published and not enforced. A value from 2015 was drawn exactly like one from 2021. Every value is now checked against its limit on every build.
- A label was read and thrown away. UNESCO's mark for a country's own estimate was dropped, so two kinds of number looked the same on the default layer. The mark is now printed.
- Two real countries were on the skip list. Cook Islands and Niue were wrongly listed as names to ignore, though both are ISO states. Their treaty rows were dropped, so their cards would have said "not bound" by a treaty the UN lists them as parties to. The build now stops if a real ISO state is on the skip list.
- A working name was sitting in a public file. The profile builder copied each interviewee's working pseudonym into a data file that would have been published, although no page displayed it. The field is no longer written.
What the Atlas cannot tell you
- Most of its numbers are estimates.
- A law is not a practice. The corporal punishment and treaty layers record what is written in law and in the UN's treaty record. They say nothing about what happens in any classroom.
- The map is smaller than the table. Some small states are too small to draw, but all 249 are in the table.
Sources and their terms
This site keeps to the strictest of its sources' terms: no advertising, no money asked for, and the derived data file carries the same share-alike and non-commercial conditions as the sources it is built from.
- WHO Global Health Observatory, SDGSUICIDE, ages 10 to 19World Health Organization. Terms: WHO data terms: public-health purposes only. Read 19 September 2026.WHO, Global Health Observatory, SDG suicide mortality rate by age group, Global Health Estimates 2021, accessed 2026-09-19, with acknowledgement to the countries that provided the underlying data.Limit kept here: Not for commercial use. WHO does not endorse this site or its wording.
- WHO Global Health Observatory, MH_12, age-standardised suicide rateWorld Health Organization. Terms: WHO data terms: public-health purposes only. Read 19 September 2026.WHO, Global Health Observatory, age-standardised suicide rates, Global Health Estimates 2021, accessed 2026-09-19, with acknowledgement to the countries that provided the underlying data.Limit kept here: Not for commercial use.
- WHO Global Health Observatory, MH_6, psychiatrists working in the mental health sectorWorld Health Organization. Terms: WHO data terms: public-health purposes only. Read 19 September 2026.WHO, Global Health Observatory, psychiatrists working in the mental health sector per 100,000, accessed 2026-09-19, with acknowledgement to the countries that provided the underlying data.Limit kept here: Not for commercial use. The series has not been refreshed since 2017.
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ROFST.2.CP, out-of-school rate, lower secondaryUNESCO Institute for Statistics. Terms: CC BY-SA 4.0. Read 19 September 2026.Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), https://api.uis.unesco.org/api/public/data/indicators?indicator=ROFST.2.CP, extracted 2026-09-19.Limit kept here: ShareAlike: anything built from this data carries the same licence.
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics, CR.2, completion rate, lower secondaryUNESCO Institute for Statistics. Terms: CC BY-SA 4.0. Read 19 September 2026.Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), https://api.uis.unesco.org/api/public/data/indicators?indicator=CR.2, extracted 2026-09-19.Limit kept here: ShareAlike: anything built from this data carries the same licence.
- World Bank, SE.LPV.PRIM, learning povertyThe World Bank. Terms: CC BY 4.0. Read 19 September 2026.The World Bank: World Development Indicators: Learning poverty (SE.LPV.PRIM), extracted 2026-09-19.
- World Bank, country list and GDP per capitaThe World Bank. Terms: CC BY 4.0. Read 19 September 2026.The World Bank: World Development Indicators: income group and GDP per capita (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD), extracted 2026-09-19.
- United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IVUnited Nations. Terms: Terms not published for the status pages. Read 21 October 2026.United Nations Treaty Collection, status as at 2026-10-21, read 2026-10-21.Limit kept here: Every count is printed with the date the UN itself stamped on the page. A treaty count without that date is not published here.
- End Corporal Punishment, global progress tableEnd Corporal Punishment (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children). Terms: No licence published on the table or its page (checked 2026-09-04 and 2026-09-19). Read 19 September 2026.Legal status from End Corporal Punishment, Global progress towards prohibiting all corporal punishment, last updated March 2025.Limit kept here: The table itself is NOT republished. One fact per country, with attribution and a link to the source.
- GCPEA, Education under Attack 2026Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. Terms: (c)2026 GCPEA, no further terms published. Read 19 September 2026.Education under Attack 2026, Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, read 2026-09-19.Limit kept here: A badge and a link out, never a map colour and never a ranking.
- WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024, country profilesWorld Health Organization. Terms: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Not read into the Atlas yet.WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024, country profile, page noted on each value.Limit kept here: Non-commercial and ShareAlike. No WHO logo. Values are what a government reported on a checklist, not a measurement.
- Natural Earth, countries 110m (via world-atlas)Natural Earth. Terms: Public domain. Used only for the shapes of the map, not for any value.Base map: Natural Earth, public domain. Boundaries are drawn for legibility and are not a statement about any border.
How the words are checked
Your rights
Every legal claim names its instrument and article, quotes the official text in under 15 words, and links to it. Each chapter marks which lines are treaty text and which are a UN committee's reading of the treaty.
What the checking has already caught, so you can see it is real: a quotation that dropped the treaty's own words "shall strive to ensure" and so promised more than the treaty does; a sentence saying countries without a full ban "usually" have a partial one, when 53 of the 62 have none at all; a heading that made any refused adjustment discrimination, where the treaty says a reasonable one; a route to a hearing named with its two-year deadline left off; and, in the chapter about complaining to the UN, a treaty line protecting the reader's name that had been left out altogether.
All nine chapters are published: Your rights.
Voices
A profile is built only when four dates exist: the month consent was given, the day it was checked line by line for any detail that could identify the person, the day it was checked against safe-messaging rules, and the day Bella approved it. A quotation must be the person's own words or be labelled as a paraphrase, runs to 40 words at most, and may not contain a year.
5 profiles are published so far: Voices.
Where AI helped
Bella used an AI assistant (Claude) as a tool throughout. It wrote the code that fetches the data and builds these pages, drafted explanatory text including this page, and ran the checking passes described above. It did not conduct the interviews, and it did not decide what this site says. The fuller statement is on About.
If something is wrong
Say so, and it gets fixed or taken down: Correct this.
Nothing on this page is medical or legal advice.