Sharp and significant increases in suicides followed select financial crisis events and austerity announcements in Greece, from the start of the country’s 2008 recession to steep spending cuts in 2012, Penn Medicine researchers report in a new study published online this week in the British  Medical Journal Open, along with colleagues from Greece and the United Kingdom. After one austerity-related announcement in 2011, when the government announced steep spending cuts, suicides surged by over 35 percent, an increase that was then sustained through to the end of the study in 2012.

This is the first multi‐decade (from 1983 to 2012) national analysis using monthly data to link the most up‐to‐date suicide information in Greece to specific austerity and prosperity‐related events.

“Suicides closely followed the announcements of specific government economic programs in Greece, and grew to their highest levels in 2012 as economic austerity measures and public outcries accumulated in number and scale,” said senior author Charles C. Branas, PhD, a professor of Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Tragically, the impact of austerity measures on suicides is more significant and lasting than prosperity‐related events, such as the launch of the Euro in Greece, and appears to affect both men and women, though the trend is more pronounced in men.”

Using national suicide data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority, the team, which included researchers from the University of Crete and the University of Edinburgh, found that men in Greece experienced a significant, abrupt and sustained 13 percent increase in suicide beginning in October 2008, which marked the beginning of the recession, with a reduction in national gross domestic product and many violent protests. A 36 percent sharp and sustained increase was also observed in June 2011, when the Greek government again passed unpopular austerity measures. Those spending cuts were immediately followed by strikes that halted most public services and closed Greek banks.

At roughly the same time in 2011, the researchers found a 36 percent abrupt and sustained increase in suicides among women, the same month large, organized protests of austerity measures were held. This sustained increase in suicide among women was larger, on a percentage basis, than for men in 2011. This counters previous research showing that economic downturn results in larger increases in suicides among men, not women.

Greek men also demonstrated a large, but temporary, 30 percent increase in suicides in April 2012, following the highly publicized suicide of a male pensioner in the main square of Athens in response to austerity conditions. Many believe that the uptick in suicides was in part triggered by the media’s coverage of the incident; recognizing a possible austerity‐suicide relationship publically, so often and with such intensity could have arguably contributed to the tragedies that followed, the authors write.