The Corporate Right-Wing Agenda Is Driving Thousands of Americans to Attempt Suicide

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/corporate-right-wing-agenda-driving-thousands-americans-attempt-suicide



Virginia’s suicide rate is now the highest it’s been in the last 13 years; Virginians are now three times more likely to die from suicide than they are from homicide.

And Virginia is not alone.

Over the past decade, our nation’s suicide rate has been steadily climbing, rising a staggering 23 percent. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 700,000 emergency room visits in 2010 alone for self-inflicted injuries.

The fact is, America’s suicide rate is on the rise, and Conservative economic policies are to blame.

In a study released in May, Professors David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu of Oxford University in England found that suicide rates in both the U.S. and U.K. increase when working class wages and wealth decline.

[LeftofObama]

1. I have no problem at all believing this.

For some it seems there is just no way out.

[xchrom]

2. see also: Heed the new age of anxiety rather than bemoaning it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/heed-age-of-anxiety-stress-exhaustion

If the postwar age of anxiety was supposed to have ended 30 or 40 years ago, a swath of media articles now suggest a dramatic comeback. A new and widely reported study claims a massive increase in anxiety disorders in the UK, with an estimated 8.2 million sufferers compared to 2.3 million in 2007. The pressures of modern life, we are told, must play a large part here, with job stress aggravating the difficulties of urban populations.

The focus on socio-economic conditions is surely a good thing. In the 1980s, Thatcherism encouraged a redrafting of work-related problems as psychological ones. As each person became a unit of economic competition, it wasn't the market's fault if they didn't get a job but their own. Injustice in the marketplace was glossed over as individual failure.

Hundreds of books and articles have questioned this without gaining media exposure, so why the visibility of the new research? I was puzzled to find not a single sentence in the report linking the supposed increase in anxiety to social causes. In fact, there was no explanation at all, and the headline-grabbing prevalence rate for the UK was estimated from Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Here, we find a perfect expression of the new mental hygiene movement. Anxiety is grouped together with dementia, stroke and neuromuscular conditions as a "brain disorder", and the authors urge an approach that uses "comparable methodologies for both mental and neurological illness". Disorders are listed in terms of their cost to the economy rather than to individual lives, families and communities.

[xchrom]

3. and: Mentally ill people 'hit hard by recession'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23463309

The economic recession across Europe has had a profound impact on people with mental health problems, research from King's College London suggests.

Between 2006 and 2010, the rate of unemployment for those with mental health problems rose twice as much as for other people - from 12.7% to 18.2%.

Men and those with low levels of education were particularly affected, the study said.

The authors warn that social exclusion could increase among the mentally ill.