Is Climate Change Affecting Suicide Rates?

Every 40 seconds one person commits suicide. Only in the past 45 years the world has turned 60 per cent more suicidal than it used to be. Unemployment, low income, age (over 45), low social status, race, low educational level and mental disorders are often pinpointed as triggering factors in suicidal mood.

These reasons are not panacea, nonetheless. According to Dr. Konstantinos Fountoulakis, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, who has a significant body of published work on suicidality, the racial minorities of Black American and Latin American peoples of the US are much less suicidal than far better-off White Americans. Likewise, the indigent countries of the Middle East and Africa are not tending toward taking their lives—at least when they are in peace.

A look at the chart of global suicidality demonstrates that countries of Eastern Europe and Asia occupy almost all top places. Intriguingly, uber-rich countries like Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Denmark rank high, 14, 19, 25 and 27 respectively, far above debt-stricken, Southern European countries such as Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.

“There is a zone of very high suicidality extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and Korea and a second of very low suicidality around the Mediterranean basin. The rest of the world lies somewhere in the middle,” confirms Dr. Fountoulakis.

Among the troubled economically and fiscally countries of the Mediterranean Europe, Greece, by any chance the most troubled of all, appears the least suicidal of all, and ranks low on the chart (73), far below her prosperous creditor Germany (33), or the Great Powers of US (43) and Canada (40). This is an interesting finding as suicide rates in Greece have increased by 35 per cent in a little less than two years. Surveys are naming and shaming the crisis entering its eighth year now and the no-hope climate in a country plagued with an unemployment rate of almost 30 per cent and shrinking public welfare funds, soaring taxes, butchered pensions and so on so forth, in full accord with what Troika, and the 436 billion euros it has loansharked Greece since 2010 orders (surveys also reproach the press and the government for the public messaging of the crisis, for the way they have sensationalized despair).

A recently published study led by Dr. Fountoulakis and his team comes to explain rising suicidality through a different lens, suggesting the existence of another variable more “lethal” than unemployment: climate.

The study calculated the possible correlations between the rates of attempted and completed suicides and climate variables or yearly regional unemployment in the county of Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Northern Greece, for the years 2000–12. The scientific team investigated the archive of the Emergency Outpatient Units of three hospitals and projected the results to the county population. The rate of attempted suicides was 16.69–40.34 per 100,000 inhabitants for males and 41.43–110.82 for females. The completed suicide rates varied from 0.19 to 1.95 per 100,000 inhabitants for females and from 3.62 to 5.47 for males. Roughly 95 per cent used medication to commit suicide (medication is the dominant method of attempting suicide in the first-world, in stark contrast to the pesticides a person of the developing world will consume to kill themselves). The researchers found that the attempt rate correlated negatively with regional unemployment both for males and females but the completed suicide rate for males correlated positively with unemployment though for females there did not seem to be a major difference.

On top of everything, attempts peaked in May and August, that is when spring and summer are in full bloom—and reached rock bottom in February and December, at the border of winter.

In a nutshell, climate influenced men and women in a different way, but the climate effect was undeniably stronger than the effect of unemployment. This adds to data suggesting that around the world, including Europe and the US, the recent increase in suicidal rates preceded by approximately one year the increase in unemployment.

Past surveys have also linked worldwide rises in temperature to aggression and found suicides, especially violent ones, more common during hot summer months and heat waves, which amplify mental and behavioral disorders. A research in neighboring Italy found that the latest climate changes brought about by global warming also increased suicide mortality in the country. Be that as it may, other scientific voices raise their concerns about how most suicidal individuals are closely monitored by friends and family when they spend more time indoors during the cold days of winter or that not all places around the planet are responding symmetrically to climate change; some are warming, some are drying, some are cooling.

Asked whether global warming will indeed shoot up the number of suicides the world over, Dr. Fountoulakis answers: “Populations have adapted to the climate of their country over the course of centuries, something evident in, for example, the color of the skin. Predominantly, it is the changes in established climate conditions that affect suicidality in prone people. Current evidence prohibits us from drawing definitive conclusions on such a delicate issue, but we are conjecturing that global warming might influence the suicide rate.”