Suicide rate jumps amid European financial crisis

A Greek Orthodox priest holds a memorial service at the site where an elderly man shot himself at Athens' main Syntagma square, on April 4, 2012. / AP Photo

(MoneyWatch) When an elderly Greek man killed himself on a busy Athens street Wednesday, he left a note blaming the nation's financial crisis. Tragic acts like this are increasing across Europe, as worsening economies are causing rising rates of suicide.

Dimitris Christoulas shot himself while standing opposite Greece's parliament building. In a note he left, the 77-year-old retired pharmacist wrote, "[the] government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance."

Before the financial crisis first began, Greece had the lowest suicide rate in Europe at 2.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Eurostat. That has now almost doubled and is rising at an alarming rate. A Greek Ministry of Health study found the suicide rate in the first half of 2011 was 40 percent higher than the year before.

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An article published last year in the medical journal Lancet found a direct correlation between economic stress and suicide in Greece. According to the study, people in high economic distress reported a "significantly higher" number of suicide attempts than people who weren't doing as badly. While Greece's total unemployment rate is over 20 percent, for people between 25 and 40 it is a staggering 42 percent.

Similar increases are being seen across the hardest hit areas of Europe. Portugal's suicide rate in 2009 was almost double what it was at the start of decade. Ireland saw a 13 percent increase in suicides among people under 65 between 2007 and 2008. Another study in Lancet found the overall increase in suicides across the EU since 2007 corresponded to increases seen during other severe economic downturns.

The U.S. has also seen a significant rise in suicide since the crisis began. In 2000, there were 10.5 suicides per 100,000 people. By 2009 it had increased to 12 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Unfortunately, severe budget cuts in Europe have left people with far less access to health care services just as they need it most. The government ordered Greek hospital administrators to cut their budgets by 40 percent last year. The impact of this is hitting in other areas as well, like the rate of HIV infection, which has skyrocketed. In 2001, there were 3.7 cases of HIV per 100,000 people in Greece. In 2011, it was up to 8.4.

[realworldxxx]

Instead of shooting themselves. Perhaps it would have been more effective to start a moveement by shooting the politicians and financial people that caused their dilemma in the first place. How many Jamie Dimons and Blankfeins, George Bush's and Koch Brothers, getting shot by people that were financially ruined, do you think it would take to turn this thing around. I don't think that many and their losses would be more acceptable

[credibility2]

Suicide is the coward's way out of living with challenges and without. People who expected their government for everything or who lived beyond their means and reasonableness, have no one to blame but themselves. The very people who expected their government to do for them without them giving back or doing for themselves caused the problems.

[Nikos_Retsos]

I believe Mr. Dimitris Christoulas suicide was designed to provoke public anger, very much like the public immolation of Tibetan monks protesting Chinese rule on their homeland. Mr. Chistoulias, who has a career as a pharmacist, should have saved enough to enjoy a plum retirement without depending on his pension to survive.

He didn't, as many Greeks don't. Worse yet, they have always voted into office every charlatan politician who promised them fat salaries, fat pensions, and social benefits that Greece couldn't afford, but which they were funded with foreign borrowed money. In short, they lived like the grasshopper in the Aesop's "The Grasshopper and the Ant" fable. And now they are starving like the grasshopper because they never bothered to think that the foreign debt would have to be paid back some day. They always thought: "That's the politician's problem - not mine!" Well, now they know -the hard way- that it is theirs!

This Greek tragedy of economic hardship is a necessary re-education for many Greeks. Greeks have to understand that they cannot live on "foreign borrowed welfare benefits" forever! And breaking this bad habit with a sledgehammer is the only option, and a good medicine for them! Nikos Retsos, retired professor

P.S. This opinion was also published in the Athens Greek newspaper "Kathimerini"

[joyceck]

Malthus strikes again! Capitalism bring such Joy!