Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We're your statistical guide to life, and I'm Tim Halford.

Every year around the world, 800,000 people kill themselves, according to the World Health Organization.

It's a particularly distressing cause of death, and statisticians and epidemiologists are trying to understand the patterns,

and perhaps improve our ability to prevent suicide.

At the same time, popular myths about suicide abound. Some people say Christmas is a high-risk day for suicides.

Others point to January. So what did the numbers tell us?

Listener Frank Kirkland recently got in touch, reflecting on his own bereavement.

My brother was having a tough time. He was very cheerful over Christmas 2014, but then in the new year he took his own life on the 16th of January.

Sorry to be a bit grim, but it might be worth you investigating the statistics for January.

See if it's really a bad month or whether it is an over myth.

He could potentially help loved ones to feed perhaps a bit more attentive and sensitive to spot the warning signs.

Well thank you Frank. I spoke with Nav Capur, professor of psychiatry and population health at the University of Manchester in the UK.

He says that for years researchers have actually believed that the late spring and early summer was the time of year with the highest suicide rate.

It's quite an old story in a way. It's one of the things that all doctors get taught at medical school or psychiatrist learn about this spring and summer peak.

Studies across Europe, Japan, Taiwan, the US, Australia and South Africa have shown that the suicide rate is higher during the late spring.

So this finding about spring and summer peak in suicide has been shown fairly robustly in some of the older studies.

And what's interesting is you see the same pattern in the northern and the southern hemisphere.

The other thing you find with this finding is that the seasonal effects seem to lessen the closer you get to the equator.

But in the UK, home to Frank and to his late brother, the trend might be changing.

In a study we did, we actually did find that the month with the highest suicide risk was January.

But it wasn't significantly higher than spring.

And really the main finding of our study was that December had a very low suicide risk.

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