Financial failure is simply the final, fatal blow
Insurmountable anger, not losing millions, is often the determining factor in suicide cases linked to debt, says
Coline Covington
How many more victims of the financial crisis will there be? The US, the UK, Japan, India, and Egypt have all reported growing concern over suicides linked to debt. They are wise to be worried: in Japan the suicide rate increased by 34 per cent during the 1998 financial crisis.
On the face of it, it is hardly surprising that a sudden downturn in an individual's finances can precipitate depression and, in certain cases, suicide. But what is most striking about many of the suicides reported here and in the US in the last few months is their extreme rage. Men who have lost their fortunes kill themselves and sometimes their families as well; wives kill themselves when their husbands lose everything; men and women kill themselves as their houses are repossessed.
These suicides may appear to be fuelled by despair, helplessness, shame, and in some cases guilt, but in many cases the suicide note reveals overwhelming anger. One woman, facing foreclosure on her house, wrote to the mortgage company: "You have failed to protect me. You have broken your promise. You have destroyed my life."
Italian poet Cesare Pavese coined the phrase ‘suicides are shy homicides’
Mortgage companies, banks, investment companies, and now governments are being blamed by many people for their devastating losses. Since they can't murder the institutions or the Madoffs of this world, people are killing themselves instead. The Italian poet Cesare Pavese coined the phrase "suicides are shy homicides". Recent suicides linked to the financial crisis are no exceptions.
But it is not simply the case that people who have suffered these huge financial losses feel angry, let down, and helpless. For many of these suicides, financial failure is the final blow in a long history of feeling inadequate, rejected and robbed of love. The murder that takes place is against an internal parental figure who has made the individual believe that he can only be loved if he is successful; more often than not, this also means self-reliant and hard working.
So, when financial loss occurs it is especially traumatic. The efforts to gain love in the eyes of the parent have been suddenly wiped out in one fell swoop, and further efforts seem utterly futile. There is a powerful sense that everything is doomed to fail because it will all be undone in the end. Being left with no money (or house) is equivalent to being left with a parent who has withdrawn love for no apparent reason.
More specifically, it is like
being let down by a parent who puts their own needs first, leaving the child at risk. What seemed safe and relatively secure no longer exists, and the failure of the banks and mortgage companies to go on providing this security inevitably triggers off memories of parental failure that can feel life-threatening.
In some cases, the parent who needs to be pleased may also be projected onto the wife or husband, and the experience of rejection may thus be twofold. Failing one's spouse can be humiliating and shameful but also persecuting. One banker, referring to a colleague's suicide, described it as an act of honour because his colleague had felt so responsible to his clients for inadvertently losing their money in the Madoff fraud.
The guilt and despair such failure elicits is enormous. But so is the rage. In the case of people who have traumatic histories of emotional insecurity, the combination of despair and rage can produce a fatal cocktail. Add to this the impotence in not being able to actually kill the parent who has failed you (that is, the person or institution on whom you depended and who has betrayed you), and you come up with suicide. 
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