Evolución del número de suicidios en España respecto a variables macroeconómicas

In certain countries, the suicide mortality supposes a problem of public health. In Spain, serveral studies have analyzed if the number of suicides has been modified due to the economic crisis, as a consequence of unemployment, low incomes, poverty, social inequality, cuts in social services, health or education, concluding that in Spain the suicide attemps have not increased since the years before the economic crisis, not being able to appreciate inmediate effects for the health and not being able to prove a causal connection between financial crisis and suicide. Nevertheless, other authors point out that there is an important relation between suicides and young age aswell as elders, a poor health and depression, that can be increased due to the economic crisis. In opposite, out of Spain, a study concludes that there exists a relation beween the recent suicide cases in the English regions with higher unemployment rates as a consequence of the economic crisis. Relating the british study and due to the fact that the spanish authors has mostly concentrate their efforts on determining the economic crisis influence on suicides, we try to analize, from a broader point of view, the possible existence of a casual relation between the main macroeconomic indicators and the suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, the methodology used has been to extract data relating demography, causes of death (suicide and self-inflicted injury), GDP, CPI and unemployment in complete historical series sufficiently representative so as to be considered as sampling, between 1980 and 2012, analyzing the evolution of the mentioned variables as well as the statistical distribution and their possible correlation. Furthermore, we develope a gender distribution for the purpose of the determination whether differentiated behaviours exists. Following the analysis, in conformity with the consulted authors, the number of suicides seems to be independent of unemployment rate increase or, in any case, seems that this increase is inversely related to the number of suicides. Nevertheless, the studied macroeconomic variable that shows a higher correlation coefficient with regard to the suicide rate is GDP, with indeces that show that the evolution of the male suicide rate is highly related with GDP evolution and, on the contrary, the number of women's suicides represents a continued evolution and even slightly linear independently of the macroeconomic variables consulted. In terms of carrying out a prognosis about the total number of suicides, it is proposed to establish on the one hand, the male number of suicides according to the forecast for the development of the GDP and, on the other, the women number of suicides in linear geometric progression with the coefficients obtained.