Suicide rates among middle-aged adults had a sharp rise during the Great Recession.
The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, dubbed as the Great Recession, is considered by many economists as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Large financial institutions collapsed while stock markets dropped worldwide. The housing market also suffered, resulting to evictions, foreclosures, and high unemployment rates.
Researchers observed that suicide rates among adults between 40 and 69 years old significantly jumped by 40 percent since 1999. They examined whether the reasons are job-related or due to financial problems.
During the study period, the suicide rate climbed by 15 percent between 2005 and 2010. The analysis also showed that suicide cases related to job and financial problems also jumped by 4.5 percent during the same period. The researchers didn't see the same trend for young and older adults.
"Relative to other age groups, a larger and increasing proportion of middle-aged suicides have circumstances associated with job, financial, or legal distress and are completed using suffocation," study author Katherine A. Hempstead, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, NJ, said in a press release.
"The sharpest increase in external circumstances appears to be temporally related to the worst years of the Great Recession, consistent with other work showing a link between deteriorating economic conditions and suicide."
So why are middle-aged adults more vulnerable to suicide in times of a financial crisis? Experts believe that this age group are the least likely to recover from their financial loss because they have lesser time left to save up if ever they get another job.
"That middle-aged population, there is a lot more riding on their ability to have an income," Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, told HealthDay News. "They're that sandwiched generation, having fiscal responsibilities for both sides, the younger and the older, their children and their parents."
The study was published in the Feb. 27 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
