SUICIDE RATES rose sharply in Europe from 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with Ireland and Greece – among the worst hit countries – seeing the most dramatic increases, researchers have said.
Meanwhile, rates of road deaths in the region surveyed fell during the same period, possibly because increased unemployment had led to reduced use of cars, according to an initial analysis of data from 10 European Union countries.
“Even though we’re starting to see signs of a financial recovery, what we’re now also seeing is a human crisis. There’s likely to be a long tail of human suffering following the downturn,” said David Stuckler, a sociologist at Britain’s Cambridge University, who worked on the analysis.
Mr Stuckler, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Sanjay Basu of the University of California San Francisco published their initial analysis in the Lancetjournal, and said the data "reveal the rapidity of the health consequences of financial crises".
Mr Stuckler said the researchers did not yet have enough data to make a worthwhile estimate of how many deaths could be linked to the financial crisis, but that was something they planned to do in future.
“In particular, we want to understand better why some individuals, communities, and entire societies are especially vulnerable, yet some seem more resilient to economic shocks,” the researchers wrote.
Mr Stuckler said he feared the social and health costs of the global economic downturn would turn out to be high. “We can already see that the countries facing the most severe financial reversals of fortune, such as Greece and Ireland, had greater rises in suicides,” he said.
“And suicides are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health problems. Suicide itself is a relatively rare event, but wherever you see a rise in suicides there is also a rise in failed suicide attempts and in new cases of depression.”
Analysing data available so far, Mr Stuckler and colleagues found suicide rates were up 17 per cent in Greece and 13 per cent in Ireland.
Unemployment increased by 2.6 percentage points – a 35 per cent relative increase – between 2007 and 2009 across the EU as a whole, they said. “The steady downward trend in suicide rates, seen . . . before 2007, reversed at once,” the researchers wrote.
In 2008 the increase in suicide rates in new EU members states then studied – such as Hungary and Lithuania, which joined after 2004 – was less than 1 per cent, but in the older members it increased by almost 7 per cent. In both,, suicides increased further in 2009.
Among the 10 countries studied for the latest research – Austria, Britain, Finland, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia and Romania – only Austria had fewer suicides in 2009 than in 2007, with the rate down 5 per cent.
In all the other countries there was an increase of at least 5 per cent.
Latest Central Statistics Office figures show, however, that the number of deaths by suicide recorded in Ireland fell to 486 last year, an 8 per cent drop on 2009.
In Britain, suicide rates rose from a recent low of 6.14 per 100,000 people aged under 65 in 2007 to 6.75 in 2008 – an increase of 10 per cent, and remained similarly high in 2009. – (Reuters)