Youth unemployment, economic deprivation and suicide

The objective of this article is to shed light on the relationship between unemployment and financial hardship/ recession on the one hand and suicide of young persons on the other, based partly on a review of the literature and partly on a tentative analysis of empirical data from Sweden. Aggregated data have been used to produce a descriptive analysis of the changes in suicide rate with time, changes in the unemployment rate and the proportions of those in receipt of social allowance. Individual level data have been used to perform a cohort study.
The results based on aggregated data show that no signs of positive links between suicide rates and unemployment/social allowance recipients figures can be found among Swedish young persons during the last decade. The results from the cohort analysis show a clear link between economic deprivation on the one hand and suicide on the other during the second part of the 1980s.