Highest suicide rates in the world - wtf Eastern Europe?

[Lobotomy]

according to wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate) out of the top 20 countries by suicide rate, 12 of them are formerly eastern bloc countries. Why do you think this is?

[runequester]

"shock therapy" after the counter-revolutions, millions thrown into poverty, increasing crime and deprivation.

[Zulu]

Capitalism kills.

[Blake's Baby]

In Hungary suicides trebled between 1954 and 1983, after which they started to decline. By 2010, they'd reached 1954 levels. Probably not the shock of 'counter-revolution'. Unless you mean the counter-revolution of Russian tanks crushing the Hungarian Soviets in 1956.

[manic expression]

In Hungary suicides trebled between 1954 and 1983, after which they started to decline. By 2010, they'd reached 1954 levels. Probably not the shock of 'counter-revolution'. Unless you mean the counter-revolution of Russian tanks crushing the Hungarian Soviets in 1956.
I'd like to see a source on that.

And your support of pro-CIA mobs has been shown for what it is time and again on this forum, don't drag it into this topic needlessly.

[Blake's Baby]

And your support for mass murderers of workers and communists is well known, and yet you seem keen to flaunt it.

It's not hard to find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_suicide_rate.png


Description Hungarian suicide rate.png Suicide rate in Hungary (1950-2010)
Date 28 October 2011(2011-10-28)
Source own work (data source: Hungarian Central Statistical Office)
Author Rovibroni (Barna Rovács)

[Deicide]

Lithuania, the country I'm from, has the highest suicide rate in the world:crying:

[manic expression]

@Blake's Baby, it is your endless naivete that leads you to adopt stale ruling-class rhetoric, but that's what I expect from those who support anti-socialist lynch mobs.

It seems as though alcohol consumption is one of the factors (http://www.jstor.org/pss/4200830) to blame both then and now. Another factor (http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/suli.2008.38.4.363) that might help explain the decrease after the mid-80's is antidepressant drugs (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/9/45) being more widely available after your precious anti-socialist "revolution" succeeded, but of course dependence on drugs probably isn't a long-term solution to this problem (from the third link):

"In general there has been an eight-fold increase in the rate of antidepressant prescription in Hunagry over the last two decades so one focus of investigation might be the appropriate prescription of antidepressants to those in clinical need."

[Blake's Baby]

Can't count can you?

Hungarians were happiest in 1954. Yay! Stalin's dead! Let's not kill ourselves!

Fast forward a couple of years... shit, nothing's getting better, better revolt against the system - crap, they sent the tanks in - let's start killing ourselves again... oh, it's getting much much worse over the next 30 years of Stalinist shit.

The figures start dropping in 1983. Was your enlightened Glorious Peoples Democratic Happy Workerland dosing people up with massive doses of chemicals then, by any chance? Or was there something else going on? Maybe they started celebrating because they'd heard Brezhnev was dead. Yay! Brezhnev's dead! Let's not kill ourselves!

My 'precious anti-socialist revolution' was nothing of the kind. a) not precious, though at the time, being young and foolish, I thought that after Prague and Warsaw and Budapest, Paris Bonn and London were next (shows what I know); b) not a revolution, but a changing of the crew while the ship of state is sinking.

Anti-socialist? Yes. Not in the sense of removing socialists... because unless you're 'some kind of revisionist' (I neither know nor care if you are) I'm sure you think they were pro-Western Gorbachovian lickspittles of capitalist running dogs, or something by 1989 (the Hungarians were the 'liberalisers' in the Warsaw Pact in the mid-80s of course, the ones who, you know, took the barbed wire down and told all those East Germans they could go over). Not even in the sense of opposing socialists directly. But certainly in the sense of being opposed to socialism. But as the previous lot were too, no great loss either way as far as I can tell.

But of course, the point that there's nothing to chose between them - massive state repression with full employment, or the illusion of freedom with massive unemployment - will utterly pass you by won't it? The idea that when confronted with a choice of social-democracy-plus-bayonets, and neo-linberalism with rubber bullets, the international working class (remember them?) might just say - fuck the lot of you.

[runequester]

So looking at the figures and timeline Blake's baby posted, it would seem that as the USSR moved away from Stalin, and Hungary moved into goulash communism... suicide rates went up dramatically.

Thank you. I never took you for a stalinist hardliner.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Personally i think the information is dodgey. France, Belgium and Switzerland ahead of the US in suicides?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

The reality of capitalism is a harsh one and I suppose many who lived in socialist nations could not handle the shock of the switch and all that entailed.A depressing thought.

[m1omfg]

Guys, why always trying to connect everything with either Stalinism or capitalism? South Korea has the second biggest suicide rate in the world after Lithuania and Japan is not too far off. Some of the poorest countries in the world have near zero suicide rates. Does this mean Haiti is a wonderful place because it has an official suicide rate of zero?

Industrialized countries have much higher suicide rates than non-industrialized countries because in third world countries people generally believe that their place in life is natural/given by God and thus endure misery and generally think suicide would send them to hell. And in third world countries, stuff like malaria or ebola kills many people way before they would even think about suicide. Not that suicide is in any way good, it just tends to occur in more industrialized societies.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Guys, why always trying to connect everything with either Stalinism or capitalism? South Korea has the second biggest suicide rate in the world after Lithuania and Japan is not too far off. Some of the poorest countries in the world have near zero suicide rates. Does this mean Haiti is a wonderful place because it has an official suicide rate of zero?

Industrialized countries have much higher suicide rates than non-industrialized countries because in third world countries people generally believe that their place in life is natural/given by God and thus endure misery and generally think suicide would send them to hell. And in third world countries, stuff like malaria or ebola kills many people way before they would even think about suicide. Not that suicide is in any way good, it just tends to occur in more industrialized societies.

South Korea and Japan have such high suicide rates due to the stress caused by the pressure to excel.

[m1omfg]

South Korea and Japan have such high suicide rates due to the stress caused by the pressure to excel.

I live in Slovakia, and to assure you, it is not much different here. After the fall of communism, everybody wants to be a lawyer but usually ends up on a 300-700 euros/month menial job. You have a culture of expectation in every industrialized country, in the third world, you do not. Indian slum dwellers think their horrible suffering is ordrained by Hindu gods, because of the caste system, for example. It is the industrialized world's "You MUST go to collage so you'll not live like normal people do" culture vs. the fatalistic "Your dad was a bricklayer, your granddad was a bricklayer, your grangrandgrandgranddad was a bricklayer, you will be a bricklayer son, anything else is a sin" culture in most of the third world.

Both are, needless to say, pathological, and formed by either industrial development, or the lack of it. It has a positive side, of course, you are always more likely to susceed if you try and on the opposite side, many people from underdeveloped world are able to live their life better despite the material conditions, I have a friend from Paraguay, which is a country ridden by poverty, one of the highest levels of inequality in the world and the history of a few decades long fascist dictatorship, but he is far more friendly, laidback, kind and helpful (he works as an assistent for severely disabled people) than most Slovak people I have ever met. Guess it is "glass half full/half empty" kind of thing. Many people here in Slovakia who have TV, central heating, more than enough food and a roof over their heads, computer and internet and home whine way more than any third world person. You'd think they live in some sort of Somalian type squalor if you only looked at their words and not their situation. And of course, those with the biggest right to complain just freeze outside to death in this -20 degrees winter, or just quietly chew stale bread in their homes while politicians and capitalists decide to put even MORE money into their pockets.

[Blake's Baby]

Guys, why always trying to connect everything with either Stalinism or capitalism? ...

Well, in my case it was probably mostly to provide a counter to the 'All hail Comrade Moustache and His Awesome Enlightenment! Death to the Enemies of Moustaches and their Capitalist Plots!' nonsense one gets from the Tankies round here.


...Industrialized countries have much higher suicide rates than non-industrialized countries because... Not that suicide is in any way good, it just tends to occur in more industrialized societies.

Yeah this is important. I'll leave the middle section as I think that's frankly dodgy. Industrial society under capitalism is shit. It's true.


So looking at the figures and timeline Blake's baby posted, it would seem that as the USSR moved away from Stalin, and Hungary moved into goulash communism... suicide rates went up dramatically.

Thank you. I never took you for a stalinist hardliner.

Hungarians were never happier than when they found out Stalin had died. That's totally what a Stalinist hardliner would say.

[manic expression]

Hungarians were never happier than when they found out Stalin had died.
Rather, they were never happier when they were living in the society created by Stalin's policies. They only got sad because of the Sino-Soviet Split.

[Blake's Baby]

That's the spirit. It was the Secret Speech that did for them, wasn't it? Damned Kruschev and his 'nyet nyet' table-banging. He just didn't care for those suicidal Hungarians you know. No moustache, see?

[RevSpetsnaz]

I live in Slovakia, and to assure you, it is not much different here. After the fall of communism, everybody wants to be a lawyer but usually ends up on a 300-700 euros/month menial job. You have a culture of expectation in every industrialized country, in the third world, you do not. Indian slum dwellers think their horrible suffering is ordrained by Hindu gods, because of the caste system, for example. It is the industrialized world's "You MUST go to collage so you'll not live like normal people do" culture vs. the fatalistic "Your dad was a bricklayer, your granddad was a bricklayer, your grangrandgrandgranddad was a bricklayer, you will be a bricklayer son, anything else is a sin" culture in most of the third world.

Both are, needless to say, pathological, and formed by either industrial development, or the lack of it. It has a positive side, of course, you are always more likely to susceed if you try and on the opposite side, many people from underdeveloped world are able to live their life better despite the material conditions, I have a friend from Paraguay, which is a country ridden by poverty, one of the highest levels of inequality in the world and the history of a few decades long fascist dictatorship, but he is far more friendly, laidback, kind and helpful (he works as an assistent for severely disabled people) than most Slovak people I have ever met. Guess it is "glass half full/half empty" kind of thing. Many people here in Slovakia who have TV, central heating, more than enough food and a roof over their heads, computer and internet and home whine way more than any third world person. You'd think they live in some sort of Somalian type squalor if you only looked at their words and not their situation. And of course, those with the biggest right to complain just freeze outside to death in this -20 degrees winter, or just quietly chew stale bread in their homes while politicians and capitalists decide to put even MORE money into their pockets.

Thats because material wealth equals status and the higher your status the more doors open for you. Ive always thought that the strive for a higher status via material wealth is what causes people to view one another as a resource to be exploited, rather than another human being.

[manic expression]

That's the spirit. It was the Secret Speech that did for them, wasn't it? Damned Kruschev and his 'nyet nyet' table-banging. He just didn't care for those suicidal Hungarians you know. No moustache, see?
Judging by your sarcastic approach, I assume you now realize how absurd your original proposition was.

[Arlekino]

Lithuania, the country I'm from, has the highest suicide rate in the world:crying:

It is sad news as myself came from Lithuania and I do know many of my friends committed suicide even in Soviet Times. It seems something wrong with personal life they are hanging himself s.

[Invictus_88]

The easy claim would be along the lines that "the transition to free market capitalism has not been easy", so blaming the suicide rates on the sense of uncertainty and upheaval in the move from oppressive communism to liberating capitalism.

However, if the rates fail to drop, it might look more plausible to blame a consequence of that transition: inequality of wealth.

[Blake's Baby]

Judging by your sarcastic approach, I assume you now realize how absurd your original proposition was.

My original proposition?

You mean the one where I tried to point out that the drop in suicides in Hungary from 1983 onwards was probably not due to the mass introduction of anti-depressants in the last 20 years (ie since 1992), as you claimed, nor due to the 'shock' of 'counter-revolution' after 1989 as Runequester claimed (as he seemed to think that the suicide rate in Eastern Europe was higher post-89 than before, which in Hungary's case isn't true)?

Come on. Of course it was absurd. Absurdism is a feature of this discussion, because it's based on a mentality that says everything was great in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1989 and anything bad is because of things that 1-happened after 1989 or 2-due to a lack of proper application of Stalinism. As that isn't a serious argument, I don't feel obliged to take it seriously.

[The Young Pioneer]

I'm surprised the internationalists around here haven't complained about a country-by-country breakdown of this discussion.

What I personally noticed about the list is that the suicide rate is mostly higher in males than in females across the board. (Also, I've read elsewhere that females are more likely to attempt but males are more likely to actually die.) I think that info. is a lot more disturbing and important than "which nation" has a higher rate.

[Blake's Baby]

I'm surprised the internationalists around here haven't complained about a country-by-country breakdown of this discussion...

We certainly can't look at things in isolation, which is why the idea that it's all about the correct application of Stalisnist policies as Runequester and Manic Expression suggest is patently ludicrous.

You're right that in general males have a higher suicide rate than females. Also higher alcoholism rates in most places. Whereas women (especially in the industrialised countries) tend to have higher rates of medical drugs (anti-depressants, tranquilisers) than males. But these are overall patterns, not particular to Eastern Europe, which is what the original topic was about.

[A Marxist Historian]

In Hungary suicides trebled between 1954 and 1983, after which they started to decline. By 2010, they'd reached 1954 levels. Probably not the shock of 'counter-revolution'. Unless you mean the counter-revolution of Russian tanks crushing the Hungarian Soviets in 1956.

You're answering a claim based on a post from Wikipedia, a dubious source. But then you give us no source at all.

In fact, the high suicide rates in Hungary after 1956 undoubtedly have something to do with exactly the Stalinist crushing of the one and only real political revolution against Stalinism and for Leninism, or at least for Leninism as the average Hungarian revolutionary in 1956 interpreted it. This surely must have caused a lot of despair.

But in Eastern Europe and the USSR as a whole the counterrevolution, from the standpoint of the working class, means 1989 and 1991, not 1956. So I find that Wikipedia statement highly believable.

Certainly in the USSR the death rate jumped astonishingly after 1991, to the point that the average life span for men dropped by ten years! A lot due to suicide, and even more due to hunger, cold, and the destruction of the old Soviet public medical system.

The bourgeois commentators try to blame this on alcoholism, as if people in the Soviet Union discovered vodka on the day Boris Yeltsin staggered to the helm. But if the response of the Soviet working class to capitalist restoration was really to drink themselves to death, that really says it all.

-M.H.-

[Blake's Baby]

Hmmm, I thought that was me that provided a source, two posts or so after I provided the graphic. It's all out there, people can go and look it up, as the graphic claimed to be derived from data from the Hungarian national staistical bureau, I'm sure people can validate it for themselves (or find the data to challenge it) should they wish.

And your sources are ... ?

[A Marxist Historian]

Hmmm, I thought that was me that provided a source, two posts or so after I provided the graphic. It's all out there, people can go and look it up, as the graphic claimed to be derived from data from the Hungarian national staistical bureau, I'm sure people can validate it for themselves (or find the data to challenge it) should they wish.

And your sources are ... ?

Oh, OK. I responded to your first, sourceless, post before reading the later two with the sources.

Anyway, as you hopefully noticed I more or less agree with you as to Hungary, as opposed to elsewhere in Eastern Europe which is a different story.

-M.H.-

[Blake's Baby]

I don't have any particular knowledge of suicide rates in Eastern Europe, I just knew Hungary had a massively high rate before 1989. Therefore 1989 wasn't the cause, though our Stalinist friends insist otherwise. I also know suicide rates in Scandinavia are very high. Totally unrelated to events in 1989 in Eastern Europe. So other factors at play.

General death rates in Eastern Europe have gone up I believe since 1989 - another way of expressing this is life expectancy has gone down. I think I'm right that life expectancy in Russia fell after 1991 - the World Bank figures seem to confirm this, with what is actually a steep decline of a 4-year drop in life expectancy between 1991 and 1994 - http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:RUS&dl=en&hl=en&q=life+expectancy+russia - but apparently after a low in 1994 there has been a slow rise.

These figures seem to show that the best time in the last 52 years to be Russian was between 1986 and 1989, and the current life expectancy has returned to the levels seen between 1963 and 1974, and then again from 86-91. Russians currently don't, on average, die before the age of 68, as they did before 1963, between 1974 and 1986, and between 1992 and 2007.

There are massive numbers of factors going on here. Surely, state healthcare, employment, housing and a whole raft of other things are all important. But comparing death rates for Russia and Ukraine, especially if you compare that to somewhere like the UK (which has also seen massive industrial decay and governmetns pursuing anti-working class policies) there are obviously very different things going on:

http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:RUS&dl=en&hl=en&q=life+expectancy+russia#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:RUS:GBR:UKR&ifdim=country&tstart=-312163200000&tend=1234224000000&hl=en&dl=en

Actually this is a fascinating graph-generator. Run the numbers on different European countries, it's worth it.