Financial crisis, austerity, and health in Europe

摘要

Marina Karanikolos and colleagues state that suicide is becoming more common in Spain and Portugal; however, official data for suicides in both countries from the past 5 years do not lend support to this assumption. Previous research2 has established a correlation between unemployment and suicide mortality rates, with a 1% rise in unemployment being associated with a 0.79% increase in suicide, and an even larger effect was reported for individuals younger than 65 years. Accordingly, the magnitude of the rise in unemployment in Spain and Portugal should have produced a sizeable effect on their suicide mortality rates. However, the figure shows a lower and an upper bound for this effect, which reveals that for both Spain and Portugal, it is not possible to identify a strong suicide effect directly linked to unemployment. Why have adverse socioeconomic circumstances, brought on by the current crisis, had an immediate sizeable impact on suicide rates in some European countries,34 but not in others, such as Portugal and Spain? The policy responses in Portugal and Spain involved substantial cuts in spending on health care and social support, which clearly do not have a mitigating effect.