Suicide risk and the economic crisis: an exploratory analysis of the case of Milan

In the past five years, several scientific articles have claimed that the increase some countries have registered in suicide rates since 2008 is somehow related to the economic crisis. Other research has suggested that the impact of specific economic problems on the probability of committing suicide is often mediated by other individual-level factors, mainly psychological and physical, whose negative influence is exacerbated by reductions in the availability of health and social care during an economic crisis. On the basis of almost 1,000 cases of suicide collected by the Institute of Forensic Medicine in the province of Milan, this article aims at testing whether the probability of committing suicide during an economic crisis is influenced by the interaction between an individual’s employment status and the presence of psychological or physical disease. Using a binary logistic regression model, this article demonstrates that the likelihood of committing suicide during an economic crisis is three times higher for persons affected by a severe disease, either physical or psychological, than for people who are not affected. Neither employment status nor the interaction between employment status and health status contributed to the difference between the suicide rate before and during the economic crisis.