So says a brief report in The Lancet. The authors show that suicide rates in people under the age of 65, which have been falling for several years in Europe, rose in 2008 and again in 2009, in line with unemployment figures. The overall effect was fairly small - 2009 was no worse than 2006. It still corresponds to a 5% annual increase in most countries. In Greece, Ireland, and Latvia the rise was about 15%.
That's sad but not perhaps very surprising.
What's interesting though is that road traffic fatalities fell sharply. In Lithuania, they dropped by nearly half, although they were very high to begin with, and in Spain and Ireland they fell by 25%.
The authors note that although fewer road deaths is generally a good thing, there's one downside - a shortage of donor organs for transplantation. Road accidents are a prime source of organs because they're one of the few times that young, healthy people die leaving most of the body intact.
Stuckler D, Basu S, Suhrcke M, Coutts A, & McKee M (2011). Effects of the 2008 recession on health: a first look at European data. Lancet, 378 (9786), 124-5 PMID: 21742166
4 comments:
About traffic casualties fallin' down in Spain: On July 1st 2006 started a new penalty system based in points (which had previously showed a descent in casualties in France) and also new changes in Penal Code in dec. 2007 that imposed new, wider and much harder consequences on traffic-code violations (especially taking away your license).
Maybe an oversimplified correlation in the article?
Looks to me as though the effect is solely due to the fact that there were fewer suicides in 2007 relative to every other year this decade. If you compare the suicide rates in 2008 and 2009 to the 10-year average, I imagine the effect goes away entirely.
Gus: Interesting point, but it seems to have happened in other European countries at the same time, so it could well be about the recession.
Pseudonymoniae: True. Although the 10 year average may not be a good measure since it was progressively falling over that period - at least in the "new" EU countries (Red line) - in the old EU states 2007 was a bit of a blip.
I dont know about the other nations but in ireland a lot of efforts have been made to curtail drink driving and speeding, for example this year a large amount of speed cameras have come into action, these would have likely to have had an effect.
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