For the bailiffs attempting to foreclose on Amaia Egana’s condominium apartment in the town of Barracalo in northern Spain, it must have seemed routine enough. Egana, a 52-year old former Socialist councillor, was just one of the more than 400,000 people who fell behind in mortgage ayments and faced foreclosure since the start of Spain’s financial crisis. As the bailiffs arrived at her fourth-floor flat on November 9 to evict her and change the locks, Amaia Egana jumped off the balcony and fell to her death.
The rise in suicides linked to the international recession is hardly limited to Spain however. Along with news stories about suicide clusters in India and other developing nations related to economic hardship, health statistics are also pointing to rising suicides across Greece and Italy. And the death toll appears to be spreading. In a recent study published in the British Medical Journal, more than 1,000 suicides in the United Kingdom may be directly linked to the recession.
To read more, check out my new blog post at the Psychology Today site.
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