Do Changes in Employment Status Induce or "Harvest" Suicides?

In a seminal Swedish study, Gemmill and colleagues pursued whether suicides after economic contractions might reflect an "induction" process whereby economic change induces suicide in those otherwise unlikely to engage in self-destructive behavior, or a "displacement" process whereby economic contractions effectively bring forward suicides that would have occurred eventually, and found support for both hypotheses. We therefore undertook a replication study examining the hypotheses in the Australian state of New South Wales, analyzing suicide data for the same period as examined in Sweden (i.e., 2000-2011) and also over an extended period of 1978 to 2015. Our analyses failed to replicate findings from the Swedish study in that we found greater support for the induction hypothesis. Significant associations varied across sex and age groups. Our findings support the longstanding Durkheim hypothesis that suicide rates increase during times of low social integration and as a consequence of the economic changes acting as a precipitant stressor.