Occupationless health. "I couldn't stand it any more": suicide and unemployment.

Abstract

A Welshman who was 40 hanged himself after searching unsuccessfully for work for 10 months. The next day a letter arrived offering him a job. The letter the dead man left said: "I can't go on like this, reading and watching television all day. I Unemployment has been associated not only with suicide but also with the inelegantly named parasuicide, which the Oxford Textbook of Medicine prefers to call "non-fatal deliberate self harm" and defines as: "a deliberate non-fatal act, whether physical, drug overdosage, or poisoning, done in the knowledge that it was potentially harmful, and in the case of drug overdosage, that the amount taken was excessive. "I Despite the preference of the Oxford textbook, I will use the word parasuicide-as do most people writing on the subject. But it is important not to be deceived by the similarity of the words suicide and parasuicide into thinking that parasuicide is simply failed suicide: it is not. Suicide is usually associated with severe and often longstanding psychiatric or physical illness and is commoner in older people and in men; parasuicide, in contrast, is commoner in younger people and women and is usually not associated with longstanding psychiatric illness, although the patients have often experienced intense but shortlasting anxiety or depression. Parasuicide, too, is commoner in social classes IV and V and in deprived urban areas: some association with unemployment would thus be expected.Studies looking for an association between suicide and unemployment are much commoner than those looking for an association with parasuicide, and the main reason for this is simply that parasuicide British Medical Journal, London WC1H 9JR RICHARD SMITH, MB, BSC, assistant editor is a modern phenomenon: it has increased rapidly in the past 20 years and now accounts for about a fifth of all medical emergency admissions. (Interestingly the most recent data suggest that the parasuicide rate has begun to fall, while the unemployment rate has continued to rise.) Although the older studies have thus been of suicide and unemployment, many recent studies are of parasuicide. These have the potential to be more rewarding; because there are many more cases of parasuicide than suicide prospective studies of individuals become a possibility and also the individuals are left alive to investigate. Nevertheless, these potential advantages have not led to much. And one disadvantage is that parasuicide is more difficult both to define and to measure than suicide.Studies of suicide and parasuicide in the employed and unemployed More than 150 years ago Falret suggested that suicide rates rise during economic depressions,4 and Durkheim (the father of the modern word "anomie") in his classic book on suicide confidently wrote: "It is a well known fact that economic crises have an aggravating effect on the suicidal tendency."5 Many contemporary researchers are less confident.In his review Platt follows Dooley and Catalano' in classifying studies of unemployment and both suicide and parasuicide into cross se...

Happiness and Economic Performance

“…The medical term for attempted suicide is para‐suicide. Data in Smith (1985) record the probably little‐appreciated fact that in Britain a fifth of all emergency admissions to hospital are due to para‐suicide. Dooley et al .…”

Happiness and Economic Performance

“…Data in Smith (1985) record the probably little-appreciated fact that in Britain a fifth of all emergency admissions to hospital are due to para-suicide. Dooley et al (1989) report that para-suicide is between 8 and 20 times more common than successful suicide.…”

Suicide Mortality among Kentucky Farmers, 1979–1985

“…Bureau of the Census, 1986). This may lead to an increase in the unemployment rate in rural areas, and unemployment has been associated with increased risk of suicide (Smith, 1985). Still another factor is that older farmers may not have the ability to run the heavy equipment required by the increased mechanization on farms (Martin & Olmstead, 1985).…”