In early May, widows of men who killed themselves began marching on tax offices in Bologna, Italy. Their protest? Austerity and tax collection put their husbands at risk. This is the first grassroots movement on mental health in Europe responding to what has been recently dubbed ‘suicide by economic crisis’.1
But not everyone agrees with these widows’ interpretation of events. Although articles recently published in The Lancet2 3 provided support for the hypothesis, some commentators have claimed that the suggestion that increases in suicides are linked to the recession is a ‘premature overinterpretation’.4 Are these recent suicide increases in Italy attributable to the financial crisis or just ‘normal statistical fluctuations’?
To address this question, we investigated data on suicides and attempted suicides rates reported to have been due to economic reasons between 2000 and 2010 from the Italian Institute of National Statistics.5…