Killer Economy?

Recent weeks have seen a spate of suicides by some of the most financially powerful people in the world. German billionaire industrialist Adolf Merckle lay down in front of a train after huge investment losses threatened his family's business empire. Chicago real-estate mogul Steven Good shot and killed himself in the driver's seat of his Jaguar after the property-auction business turned sour. René -Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet lost $1.4 billion to Bernie Madoff, went to work, took sleeping pills and slit his wrist.

The deaths bring up two questions: Is this the start of a disturbing recession-induced trend? And will it spread to rank-and-file Americans? The answers to both questions are a matter of debate. New York Magazine this week questioned whether a suicide epidemic was really taking place on Wall Street. In the blogosphere, Greenspan's Body Count—named after the former Federal Reserve chief whom many people see as partly to blame for the current economic crisis—offers a macabre tally of people who killed themselves or close family members allegedly due to economic pressures (the current tally is up to 72).

Psychologists acknowledge that gloomy financial forecasts could well result in an increase in the number of suicides over the next year. "The suicide rate has already gone up, and my suspicion is that it will not go down," says Paula Clayton, director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "There are data to substantiate a relationship between unemployment and suicide."

Still, statistics on suicide are hard to interpret, especially in the short term. In 2005, the last year for which national data exist, the suicide rate was 11 for every 100,000 people, up slightly from the 10.7 rate reported in 2000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National statistics for 2008 won't be available for two more years. Medical professionals also caution that it takes more than a job loss to prompt someone to kill himself. "No matter what the final blow is, 90 percent of people who kill themselves have a psychiatric disorder at the time of their death," says Clayton. But, she notes, job and portfolio losses can contribute to a deadly mix of shame, substance abuse and loss of self-image that can push some vulnerable people over the edge.

"In our world, we have come to a place where things like wealth and status become things that are intertwined with the self too much," says Steven Craig, a therapist in Birmingham, Mich. "When you have that loss of identity, and the shame and hopelessness they feel, the blow to themselves is so severe they don't feel like they can recover." Both Merckle and Good were running family businesses, and their feelings of despair may have stemmed as much from shame about letting down their forebears as from an inability to face their own losses.

Financial catastrophes and stock-market meltdowns are less likely to afflict middle-class workers, suggests T. Byram Karasu, chairman of psychiatry at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine: "Middle-class people are less likely to commit suicide over money troubles because gains and losses are never that disproportionate; their family relationships tend to be closer, deeper and broader; and their religious beliefs are stronger and play a greater role in buffering their sense of hopelessness."