#1 - JRL 7285
Social reasons behind high Russian suicide rate: expert
August 11, 2003
AFP

Some 60,000 Russians deliberately killed themselves last year, giving the country one of the highest suicide rates in the world, a leading psychiatric official said Monday.

"The reasons leading people to commit suicide are mostly social," Tatyana Dmitriyeva, head of the Serbsky Institute for Legal and Medical Psychiatry, told the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

The rate in 2002 was 38.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Serbski Institute figures, compared with 26.4 per 100,000 in 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"The World Health Organisation (WHO) reckons that a suicide rate over 20 per 100,000 is critical," Dmitriyeva said.

Among Russian men aged 45 to 57, the suicide rate was 106.7 per 100,000, she said.

Social conditions in Russia deteriorated sharply after the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent republics, as savings were wiped out by inflation, unemployment rose sharply and welfare provisions, notably in the health sector, collapsed.

The Serbski Institute figures are in line with those published in a health ministry report last month that recorded 39.7 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2001.

Dmitriyeva said members of the Finno-Ugrian language groups were three times as likely to take their own lives as other groups, with some recording rates of 120 per 100,000.

"Suicide is considered a sin among the (Russian) Orthodox, whereas it is encouraged among the Finno-Ugrians," she said.

A majority of Russia's Finno-Ugrian speakers live in Siberia and are non-Orthodox.

According to a WHO report based on older figures, Russia is ranked second for the number of suicides, after Lithuania.

The report cited 43.1 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants in Russia, as against 51.6 in Lithuania.

Similarly high rates were noted in other former Soviet republics: 41.5 in Belarus, 37.9 in Estonia, 37.4 in Kazakhstan, 36.5 in Latvia, and 33.8 in Ukraine.

By comparison, the rate for France was 20, with the United States recording 13.9 and Canada 16.4.