Suicide is an extreme, profound, desperate, and undeniable act. It leaves a corpse, and corpses cannot readily be swept under rugs as with other vital statistics.

(Much the same holds for murder vs. other crime rates, though both may be influenced by trauma medicine advances. David Simon talks of this in The Audacity of Despair, on YouTube.)

For much this reason, suicide is seem as a definitive marker of individual, and social, dysfunction. It is the title and subject of Emil Durkheim's foundational work on sociology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Durkheim

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw