POLITICS-YUGOSLVIA: Suicide ‘Epidemic’ Sweeps Serbia

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 14 2002 (IPS) - Suicides have hit alarming levels in Serbia this year. Experts are calling it an unprecedented crisis in Serb society.

The southern town Nis saw 74 suicides since the beginning of this year and the northern region of Subotica recorded more than 100.

In the days before Slobodon Milosevic, who ruled Serbia through the nineties up to October 2000 there was an average of one suicide per 100,000, says Sladjana Dragisic from the Belgrade Psychiatry Institute. “At the beginning of the nineties it rose to 12.8 per 100,000 and recently to 22.6 per 100,000, and it is still rising.”

In Belgrade with a population of 1.5 million, 900 people committed suicide last year. In Nis, the third largest city in Serbia with a population of 250,000, there were twice as many suicides last year as in the previous year. In Aleksinac near Nis, which has a population of 30,000, as many as 24 people have committed suicide this year.

“One can say this is an epidemic,” says psychiatrist Dragan Vukic from Nis. “These are alarming statistics, and a warning that the quality of life has reached the bottom, and that something serious has to be done.”

Almost two years after the fall of Milosevic the prolonged sense of hopelessness continues to take its toll among a people who have lived through wars, economic destruction and the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing.

“An increasing number of Serbs feel now that there is nothing worth living for,” says Andjelka Milic, professor of sociology at the University of Belgrade, who conducted a poll recently on family life in Serbia. “Two-thirds of families polled said that they feel like losers in all aspects of life,” says Milic.

The decade of Milosevic’s rule had become a battle of survival for the people. Prosperity was a distant dream. But with Milosevic gone, economic recovery and better times still seem distant.

Dragisic says suicides are highest among youngsters below 20 years of age who cannot cope with unemployment, poor family relations and lack of hope, and among people above 65 faced with loneliness, illness and poor living standards.

Julijana Puric, a psychiatrist from Belgrade points to high suicides among large Serb refugee communities settled in Serbia’s urban centres after coming as refugees from rural Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo. “Nearly all face poverty and many have lost loved ones during the years of war or through emigration,” she says. An estimated 600,000 Serbs who arrived from those areas in the decade of wars make almost 10 per cent of the population now.

“In a situation when you have abandoned almost everything, a terrible vacuum can exist in your life,” says Puric. “It is very difficult to pull yourself out of that.”

The increasingly brutal methods of committing suicide are also worrying experts. More and more people end their lives by self-immolition, jumping from tall buildings, throwing themselves under the wheels of trains, or blowing themselves up with hand grenades.

“But still there is no visible intention among the new authorities to tackle this problem, and prevention is practically non-existent,” says Dragisic.

POLITICS-YUGOSLVIA: Suicide ‘Epidemic’ Sweeps Serbia

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 13 2002 (IPS) - Suicides have hit alarming levels in Serbia this year. Experts are calling it an unprecedented crisis in Serb society.
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