FInancial crisis boosts European suicide rates, especially in Greece, Ireland
Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece and Ireland seeing the most dramatic increases, researchers said on Friday. Rates of road deaths in the region fell during the same period, possibly because higher numbers of jobless people led to lower car use, according to an initial analysis of data from 10 European Union (EU) 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.
Stuckler said he feared the social and health costs of the recent 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.”
Analyzing data available so far, Stuckler and colleagues found that suicide rates were up 17 percent in Greece and 13 percent in Ireland. Unemployment increased by 2.6 percentage points — a 35 percent 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.
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Zurich voters reject ban on “suicide tourism”
Voters in Zurich overwhemingly rejected on Sunday proposed bans on assisted suicide and “suicide tourism” — foreigners traveling to Switzerland to receive help ending their lives. Only 15.5 percent of voters in the local referendum backed a ban on assisted suicide, while nearly 22 percent supported a ban on suicide tourism, final results showed. About 200 people commit assisted suicide each year in Zurich.
Assisted suicide has been allowed in Switzerland since 1941 if performed by a non-physician who has no vested interest in the death. Euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” is legal only in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the U.S. state of Oregon. Many terminally ill foreigners — particularly from Germany, France and Britain — travel to Switzerland to commit suicide, taking advantage of the Swiss rules which are among the world’s most liberal.
But a rise in the number of foreigners seeking to end their lives in Switzerland, and a study showing that more and more people seeking assisted suicides in the country do not suffer from a terminal illness, have provoked heated debate.
The Swiss Evangelical People’s Party, which had supported the bans, said it regretted the outcome but was pleased it had prompted so much discussion. “We now need to make sure that assisted suicide isn’t just extended without limit and also that suicide tourism with foreigners is critically monitored,” it said in a statement.
The Swiss government has said it is looking to change the law on assisted suicide to make sure it was used only as a last resort by the terminally ill, and to limit “suicide tourism.”
The right-to-die group Exit has agreed rules to govern assisted suicide with prosecutors in Zurich in the hope they might eventually form the basis of national regulation. Foreigners are not explicitly excluded under the new rules, but a Swiss doctor who prescribes the deadly anesthetic must have met the person twice over a period of time to be sure of their wishes.
Islamist rebels take aim at Russia ahead of election year
A suicide attack on Russia’s busiest airport shows Islamist rebel leader Doku Umarov is serious about inflicting “blood and tears” on the Russian heartland ahead of the 2012 presidential election. Umarov, a 46-year-old rebel leader who styles himself as the Emir of the Caucasus, claimed responsibility for the January 24 attack that killed 36 and said he had dozens of suicide bombers ready to unleash on Russian cities.
Russia is struggling to contain a growing Islamist insurgency along its southern flank nearly 12 years after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rose to popularity by leading Russia into a second war against Chechen separatists.
In his 16-minute video, posted on several Islamist websites, Umarov vowed more attacks “on the territory of Russia. They will be carried out, God willing, there is no doubt about it.”
Chechen-born Umarov wants to create a separate state with Sharia Islamic law across the patchwork of Muslim republics along Russia’s south that he considers to be “occupied” territory.
“There will be hundreds of brothers who will be ready to sacrifice themselves for the establishment of the word of God,” Umarov, clad in camouflage and sporting a long black beard, said. On Friday he said that five or six dozen men were presently ready for “martyrdom.”
Child abuse was widespread in Belgian Catholic Church – Church report
Child sexual abuse was widespread in the Belgian Catholic Church and drove at least 13 victims to suicide, according to a report published on Friday. “Almost every institution, every school, particularly boarding schools, at one time harboured abuse,” Peter Adriaenssens, the head of a Church commission monitoring complaints, told a news conference.
More than half of its 200-page report, based on cases recorded up till then, consists of excerpts of testimony from victims. The 475 cases it recorded included victims as young as two. Two-thirds were male and boys aged about 12 were particularly vulnerable. In most cases, abuse tailed off when victims reached 15 or 16.
Adriaenssens said: “With these testimonies, it was not about superficial handling. It was about oral and anal abuse, forced and mutual masturbation. In other words, it was about people who had experienced serious acts.”
He said the commission found no evidence that the Church had systematically sought to cover up abuse, although it had found instances when nothing was done. The peak of abuse appeared to have been in the 1960s, the report concluded, with a sharp drop in the 1980s.
The full Flemish-language report and other material from the commission are posted here. The commission is still working on a French translation that should appear on this website. For a long report in French, see Belgian television RTBF.
On Thursday, a Belgian court ruled that police raids conducted as part of a judicial inquiry into allegations of child abuse by Belgian priests were illegal, throwing the full investigation into doubt.
A small book on a huge topic — about responding to suicide
There’s a knock on the door and it’s your ashen-faced neighbour come to tell you her son has just been found hanging in his bedroom. Your brother calls to inform you that his daughter has taken her life. You are shocked and speechless. And then what do you do?
Aiden Troy knows those helpless moments well. A few years ago, he got those messages — and saw some of the evidence –14 times in two months. As a Catholic parish priest in Belfast, he was often one of the first to be called by family or friends of the deceased. Sometimes police would call him first and ask him to break the news to the family and help in any way he could. In a very short time, he became more familiar than he ever expected with tragedies people usually think only happen to others.
“It is nearly impossible if you have not been there to describe what those first few moments following discovery are like. They are frightening to behold … There is no instruction book that can tell us how to cope with a suicide,” Troy says. But after years of dealing with suicide and suicide support groups, he decided to write “some tentative suggestions and observations born of my experience, in the hope that they may be helpful in a pastoral context.” He wrote it not only for other priests and not only for other Catholics, but for “a wide range of people who come into contact with suicide … the immediate family, neighbours and community … medical and hospital personnel, ambulance and police services, suicide support groups and clergy, undertakers and morgue personnel.”
“Out of the Shadow: Responding to Suicide”was launched last week in Belfast. It was introduced by Philip McTaggart, whose own son’s suicide prompted him to establish the support group PIPS — Public Initiative for the Prevention of Suicide and Self-Harm. What Troy calls his “very small book on a very huge topic” progresses step-by-step through the initial shock, the funeral and the challenge of living for weeks, months and years with such a loss. It offers no complex theories or easy answers, only humble reflections on dealing with suicide and helping those left to grieve. Most of all, it brings a once taboo topic “out of the shadow,” as the title puts it.
Some readers may remember Troy from a tense Catholic-Protestant confrontation in Belfast that he described in his first book Holy Cross: A Personal Experience. When he came to work in Paris last year, he told me he was writing a second book that was quite different from that one. I ended up helping him edit it, so by now I’ve been through the book several times. Repeated readings don’t make this “huge topic” any easier, but they drive home the need to talk about it and help those whose lives are shattered by it.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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