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Category Archives: Suicide

Spike in suicide rate in Europe and US linked to financial crisis

19 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Suicide

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debt, recession, redundancy, suicide, unemployment

Spike in suicide rate in Europe and US linked to financial crisis

Thousands of suicides are linked to the global financial crisis, with particularly high numbers of people killing themselves in countries suffering heavy job losses as austerity bites, an international study has concluded.

The research found there were about 5,000 more self-inflicted deaths in Europe and North America in 2009 – the first year after the banking crash triggered economic turmoil – than would have been expected in normal times.

Britain shared in the distressing trend, suffering 300 extra suicides in 2009, according to a study published last night by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Researchers blamed the spike in suicides on soaring dole queues – an estimated 34 million people worldwide lost their jobs during the crisis – as well as bankruptcies and housing repossessions. According to their analysis of suicide rates in 45 countries in Europe and North America, young men aged between 15 and 24 were particularly vulnerable.

“Men are more likely to be the main earner in the family and thus more affected by the recession than women. They might experience a greater degree of shame in the face of unemployment and are less likely to seek help,” their report said.

They said there was evidence that numbers of self-inflicted deaths increased sharply in countries where unemployment had been relatively low before the credit crunch.

And the researchers, from universities in Bristol, Oxford and Hong Kong, warned they could still be underestimating the extent of the problem as some countries hit hard by the financial crash were excluded from their study.

They added: “The rise in the number of suicides is only a small part of the emotional distress caused by the economic downturn. Non-fatal suicide attempts could be 40 times more common than completed suicides and for every suicide attempt about ten people experience suicidal thoughts.”

The Samaritans said the conclusions chimed with their experience of dealing with suicidal and deeply depressed callers who were increasingly raising problems with redundancy, debt and mortgage repayments.

A spokesman for the organisation said: “It is no surprise to us to be told suicides rise during recessions. A snapshot survey of calls to our branches in 2008, just before the current recession began, showed that one in 10 callers talked  about financial difficulties.

“That had risen to one in six at the end of last year. Clearly this is a factor governments need to keep in mind when planning for economic downturns.”

The Samaritans’ own research suggested that middle-aged men from disadvantaged backgrounds are at highest risk of suicide. They are up to  10 times more likely to kill themselves than men living in Britain’s most affluent areas.

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said research showed economic shocks were “seriously bad for the health”.

He said: “When people face economic hardship, and the stress and uncertainty that comes in its wake, they can react in different ways. Some will take it out on others, getting into fights, assaulting their partners, perpetrating homicides.

“Violence can also be turned inwards, leading to depression, distress and, for some, suicide.

“Whatever the economic arguments in favour of austerity, the rise in suicide rates is one of the clearest signs of its human cost,” Mr Garside added.

Official figures show that 4,331 people committed suicide in Britain in 2008 – a sharp rise of 246 on the previous year and a reversal of the general trend over the previous decade – and 4,304 in 2009. The rate fell to 4,231 in 2010, but climbed again to 4,552 in 2011.

The findings echo documented increases in suicide in previous downturns, such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s.

Also:

Loneliness, relationship problems and money troubles: The Samaritans reveal what is troubling modern man

US military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

01 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Suicide

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'moral injury', guilt, Military, PTSD, self-harm, shame, suicide

US military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

“Mom, it won’t wash off,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she replied.

“The blood. It won’t come off.”

On 20 March last year, the soldier’s striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America’s serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.

Soldier suicidesCredit: Guardian graphics

Across all branches of the US military and the reserves, a similar disturbing trend was recorded. In all, 349 service members took their own lives in 2012, while a lesser number, 295, died in combat.

Shocking though those figures are, they are as nothing compared with the statistic to which Busbee technically belongs. He had retired himself from the army just two months before he died, and so is officially recorded at death as a veteran – one of an astonishing 6,500 former military personnel who killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.

‘He wanted to be somebody, and he loved the army’

Busbee’s story, as told to the Guardian by his mother, illuminates crucial aspects of an epidemic that appears to be taking hold in the US military, spreading alarm as it grows. He personifies the despair that is being felt by increasing numbers of active and retired service members, as well as the inability of the military hierarchy to deal with their anguish.

That’s not, though, how William Busbee’s story began. He was in many ways the archetype of the American soldier. From the age of six he had only one ambition: to sign up for the military, which he did when he was 17.

“He wasn’t the normal teenager who went out and partied,” Libby Busbee said. “He wanted to be somebody. He had his mind set on what he wanted to do, and he loved the army. I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

Once enlisted, he was sent on three separate year-long tours to Afghanistan. It was the fulfillment of his dreams, but it came at a high price. He came under attack several times, and in one particularly serious incident incurred a blow to the head that caused traumatic brain injury. His body was so peppered with shrapnel that whenever he walked through an airport security screen he would set off the alarm.

The mental costs were high too. Each time he came back from Afghanistan. between tours or on R&R, he struck his mother as a little more on edge, a little more withdrawn. He would rarely go out of the house and seemed ill at ease among civilians. “I reckon he felt he no longer belonged here,” she said.

Once, Busbee was driving Libby in his car when a nearby train sounded its horn. He was so startled by the noise that he leapt out of the vehicle, leaving it to crash into the curb. After that, he never drove farther than a couple of blocks.

Nights were the worst. He had bad dreams and confessed to being scared of the dark, making Libby swear not to tell anybody. Then he took to sleeping in a closet, using a military sleeping bag tucked inside the tiny space to recreate the conditions of deployment. “I think it made him feel more comfortable,” his mother said.

After one especially fraught night, Libby awoke to find that he had slashed his face with a knife. Occasionally, he would allude to the distressing events that led to such extreme behaviour: there was the time that another soldier, aged 18, had been killed right beside him; and the times that he himself had killed.

William told his mother: “You would hate me if you knew what I’ve done out there.”

“I will never hate you. You are the same person you always were,” she said.

“No, Mom,” he countered. “The son you loved died over there.”

Soldiers’ psychological damage

For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps’ combat stress control programme, William Busbee’s expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.

He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of “moral injury” to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as “damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty.”

Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed.

“I have heard it over and over again from marines – the most common source of anguish for them was failing to protect their ‘brothers’. The significance of that is unfathomable, it’s comparable to the feelings I’ve heard from parents who have lost a child.”

Incidents of “friendly fire” when US personnel are killed by mistake by their own side is another cause of terrible hurt, as is the guilt that follows the knowledge that a military action has led to the deaths of civilians, particularly women and children. Another important factor, Nash stressed, was the impact of being discharged from the military that can also instil a devastating sense of loss in those who have led a hermetically sealed life within the armed forces and suddenly find themselves excluded from it.

That was certainly the case with William Busbee. In 2011, following his return to Fort Carson in Colorado after his third and last tour of Afghanistan, he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. He was taken off normal duties and prescribed large quantities of psychotropic drugs which his mother believes only made his condition worse.

Eventually he was presented with an ultimatum by the army: retire yourself out or we will discharge you on medical grounds. He felt he had no choice but to quit, as to be medically discharged would have severely dented his future job prospects.

When he came home on 18 January 2012, a civilian once again, he was inconsolable. He told his mother: “I’m nothing now. I’ve been thrown away by the army.”

The suffering William Busbee went through, both inside the military and immediately after he left it, illustrates the most alarming single factor in the current suicide crisis: the growing link between multiple deployments and self-harm. Until 2012, the majority of individuals who killed themselves had seen no deployment at all. Their problems tended to relate to marital or relationship breakdown or financial or legal worries back at base.

The most recent department of defense suicide report, or DODSER, covers 2011 . It shows that less than half, 47%, of all suicides involved service members who had ever been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just one in 10 of those who died did so while posted in the war zone. Only 15% had ever experienced direct combat.

The DODSER for 2012 has yet to be released, but when it is it is expected to record a sea change. For the first time, the majority of the those who killed themselves had been deployed. That’s a watershed that is causing deep concern within the services.

“We are starting to see the creeping up of suicides among those who have had multiple deployments,” said Phillip Carter, a military expert at the defence thinktank Center for a New American Security that in 2011 published one of the most authoritative studies into the crisis . He added that though the causes of the increase were still barely understood, one important cause might be the cumulative impact of deployments – the idea that the harmful consequences of stress might build up from one tour of Afghanistan to the next.

Over the past four years the Pentagon, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, have invested considerable resources at tackling the problem. The US Department of Defense has launched a suicide prevention programme that tries to help service members to overcome the stigma towards seeking help. It has also launched an education campaign encouraging personnel to be on the look out for signs of distress among their peers under the rubric “never let our buddy fight alone”.

Despite such efforts, there is no apparent let up in the scale of the tragedy. Though President Obama has announced a draw-down of US troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, experts warn that the crisis could last for at least a decade beyond the end of war as a result of the delayed impact of psychological damage.

It’s all come in any case too late for Libby Busbee. She feels that her son was let down by the army he loved so much. In her view he was pumped full of drugs but deprived of the attention and care he needed.

William himself was so disillusioned that shortly before he died he told her that he didn’t want a military funeral; he would prefer to be cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. “I don’t want to be buried in my uniform – why would I want that when they threw me away when I was alive,” he said.

In the end, two infantrymen did stand to attention over his coffin, the flag was folded over it, and there was a gun salute as it was lowered into the ground. William Busbee was finally at rest, though for Libby Busbee the torture goes on.

“I was there for his first breath, and his last,” she said. “Now my daughters and me, we have to deal with what he was going through.”

Suicide Prevention Strategy: Government Pledges £1.5m Funding

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Suicide

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Bereavement, Children, economy, men, mental health issues, prevention, self-harm, suicide, support, women

Suicide Prevention Strategy: Government Pledges £1.5m Funding

The government has promised to pump £1.5m into research exploring how to prevent suicides among those most at risk of taking their own lives.

The pledge comes as ministers unveiled a new suicide prevention strategy that is aiming to cut the suicide rate and provide more support to bereaved families

Funding will be used to look at how suicides can be reduced among people with a history of self-harm.

Researchers will also focus on cutting suicides among children and young people and exploring how and why suicidal people use the internet.

Launching the new strategy to coincide with World Suicide Prevention Day, Care Services Minister Norman Lamb said: “One death to suicide is one too many – we want to make suicide prevention everyone’s business.

“Over the last 10 years there has been real progress in reducing the suicide rate, but it is still the case that someone takes their own life every two hours in England.

“We want to reduce suicides by better supporting those most at risk and providing information for those affected by a loved one’s suicide.”

Around 4,200 people in England took their own lives in 2010 and suicide continues to be a public health issue – especially in the current period of economic uncertainty, the Department of Health said.

The suicide rate is highest amongst men aged between 35-49, while men are three times more likely than women to take their own life, according to statistics.

The new strategy, which is being backed by charity the Samaritans, is the first in more than 10 years.

Under the fresh approach, the government will work with the UK Council for Child Internet Safety to help parents ensure their children are not accessing harmful suicide-related websites.

It will also aim to reduce opportunities for suicide by ensuring prisons and mental health facilities keep people safer.

Improved support for high-risk groups – such as those with mental health problems and people who self-harm – and well as those bereaved or affected by suicide will also be offered.

Chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, Professor Louis Appleby said: “Suicide does not have one cause – many factors combine to produce an individual tragedy.

“Prevention too must be broad – communities, families and front-line services all have a vital role.

“The new strategy will renew the drive to lower the suicide rate in England.”

Around 50 national organisations from the voluntary, statutory and private sectors have also agreed to work together to tackle suicide by sharing best practice and providing support to those in need.

Samaritans chief executive Catherine Johnstone said: “We are encouraged that the government has taken this step in continuing to acknowledge the importance of suicide prevention.

“We firmly believe that suicide can be prevented by making sure people get support when they need it, how they need it and where they need it.

“This means we all have to try harder to reach people who may not now be talking to anyone about the problems they face.”

We tell boys not to cry, then wonder about male suicide

15 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Suicide

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Depression, men, mental health issues, sports stars

We tell boys not to cry, then wonder about male suicide

I’m not sure how old I was when I was first instructed that boys don’t cry – at a guess, maybe six or seven. Once it began, it came at me from all angles: family, teachers, friends, the myriad voices of media and culture. Like pretty much all boys, I learned that tears and sobs were markers of failure. Whether facing up to playground beatings, bullies or teachers, the rules of the game were simple: if you cry, you lose. As little boys begin to construct the identities of grown men, the toughest lesson to learn is toughness itself. Never show weakness, never show fragility and above all, never let them see your tears.

With such beliefs (literally) beaten into us from an early age, it is easy to be shocked by the candour of the former footballer Dean Windass. In a heartbreaking interview on Sunday he described two suicide attempts in the past few days. “Everyone thinks that Dean Windass is a laugh and a joke and a kid blah blah blah, and got loads of money and his wife and kids are lovely,” he told the People. “But that’s all a mask. I was in pieces, I couldn’t stop drinking or crying. I’ve cried every day for the last two years.”

Coming just weeks after the dreadful loss of Wales manager Gary Speed, the interview has again focused attention on the mental health of sports stars. Professional athletes undoubtedly face unique problems, but it would be a mistake to think this is just football’s problem. One out of every 5,700 men will kill themselves in any given year. The rate is between three and four times higher for men than for women, and highest among men under 35. In recent years, suicide has become the single largest cause of death for young men, overtaking even road traffic accidents. In the UK, more people die from suicide every decade than have ever died from HIV/Aids.

We are looking at an epidemic, and worse, an epidemic that society seems content to accept. There is little apparent concern that men underuse primary healthcare, and are consequently less likely to be referred to mental health services. With most psychiatric professionals accepting a causal link between suicide rates and socio-economic conditions, worklessness, poverty and insecure employment, prospects of these statistics improving in the near future look bleak.

While politicians and health services could certainly do more, surely we have a wider responsibility as a society to examine how we implant and enforce the damagingly rigid, insular stoicism that underpins our understanding of what it means to be a man. Most of us recognise that women’s sexual continence has been traditionally policed by prevailing social attitudes, but it’s less often observed that men’s emotional continence is policed in a very similar way.

As I’ve written before, attempts by men to address their own gender-specific issues are often greeted with hostility and disdain. Last year, the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, revealed that he sometimes shed a tear listening to a moving piece of music, and that he took personal attacks to heart. The response from some journalists, such as Christina Odone in the Telegraph, was vicious attacks on a “blubbing big boy”. Jane Powell of the brilliant charity Calm, who knows more about this issue than most, responded: “Telling men that they should at least pretend to be invincible, shouldn’t show feelings, should be strong and silent if they want to be a ‘real man’, is destructive, selfish and plain nasty.” Even the Guardian is not immune. Recently one professional attempted to bring a successful Australian scheme to the UK, which uses the imaginative hook of garden sheds to get men discussing and addressing their own mental health and wellbeing. The response was an article mocking the very idea that men might need help, and demanding to know why it wasn’t being offered to women instead.

There is no single, simple solution to the suicide epidemic. The first stage must be to acknowledge the problems, at both an individual and societal level. It takes immense courage and strength for men to speak about their own mental health, flouting our deepest conditioning. For that reason, we should not only wish Windass a full recovery from his current illness, but recognise that in speaking up and seeking help he did something more courageous, more important and, perhaps, more truly manly than anything in his distinguished career on the pitch.

Suicide on the rise among older men

15 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Suicide

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Children, Depression, mental health issues, older men, recession, relationships

Suicide on the rise among older men

The number of suicides and prevalence of suicidal tendencies is rising faster among older men than in any other age group, according to research released in the week the government postponed its suicide prevention strategy.

Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that the number of suicides among men aged over 55 has risen by 12% over the past decade, while suicides by men aged under 34 dropped by 30%. The mental health charity Calm said men aged 45 to 54 were still most likely to seriously consider taking their own life.

Charities and mental health experts are concerned that across all age ranges there are far more male than female suicides.

Jane Powell, the Calm chief executive, speculated that the recession might be having more of an impact on older men.

“If you are middle-aged just now and your job and life prospects are diminishing then this is tough,” she said. “There is work to show that the impact of unemployment hits men harder, and later on in life; that it’s easier for women whose lives are not necessarily defined by work and for whom part-time or temporary work isn’t by definition bad.

“Our research shows that thinking about suicide is more common than we realise, and that men and women are almost equally liable to feel suicidal. What is significant is that more men actually go on to take their lives.”

Official statistics show that 4,517 people in England and Wales killed themselves in 2010, of whom 75% were men.

Powell said there were two reasons for the discrepancy. “First, because men are by default supposed to be in control, in charge at all times and so therefore needing help is by definition unmanly.

“And second because all too often men don’t recognise what the problem is – they’ll feel out of control, angry with everything, find that their life is out of focus, not be interested in what’s happening around them – and they won’t recognise that they are depressed. And because as a man they’re supposed to be invulnerable, then suddenly the options they have of getting out of their situation start to look very slim.”

Calm, which began as a Department of Health initiative in 1997 and became a charity in 2006, has traditionally focused on reducing suicide among young men. Now it is changing its remit to include the older generation.

According to a YouGov survey carried for Calm of adults who had considered taking their own lives, a key driver was relationship status. The number of children in a household was also a factor with 18% of men with one child expressing suicidal thoughts, compared with 27% with three or more children. The government planned to launch its suicide prevention strategy last week but postponed the initiative until September.

Catherine Johnstone, chief executive of Samaritans, said: “There is strong evidence to show that interventions to support people at risk of suicide make a difference. However, it is often the case that services are failing to reach and engage men, which is why Samaritans launched a campaign in late 2010 to target working-class men who are the most at risk.

“Suicide is preventable and requires the action of multiple government departments. We welcome the forthcoming suicide prevention strategy for England and hope that it will continue to be a catalyst for change. To make a real impact, however, the strategy requires commitment from the public, private and voluntary sectors, as well as government.”

Last week it emerged that people in Manchester were more likely to kill themselves than in any other city. At a public meeting called by Manchester Users Network, a group for people with mental health issues, participants criticised cuts to services, in particular community centres, which act as lifelines to people with depression.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “The government is taking strong action on suicide prevention. We have been listening to families who have sadly been bereaved following a suicide, and have called upon experts in healthcare, criminal justice and transport to help us put together a new suicide prevention strategy for England to help save lives. We have considered all the responses received, and intend to publish our plans in September.”

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