SOCIETY: Serbia Moves to End that Suicide Fashion

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Nov 5 2003 (IPS) - The north of Serbia is turning out to be a suicide belt, experts are still trying to figure out why.

At least 700 people commit suicide every year in Vojvodina bordering Hungary, psychiatrist Zoltan Sagi told journalists in Belgrade this week.

It is not just depressing autumn that brings this urge on. This year the alarm bells sounded before autumn in Subotica town in this northern province, with 92 people taking their lives in July and 94 in August.

This town 180 km north of Belgrade has topped the list of suicides in Serbia for decades now, with more than 300 people taking their lives every year. The capital of Vojvodina province, Novi Sad, some 80 km north of Belgrade takes second place with 200 suicides a year.

The 700 suicides in Vojvodina account for 40 percent of all suicides in Serbia (1,750). Vojvodina has a population of two million in a country of 7.5 million.

The high rate of suicides in Vojvodina, 30 per 100,000 people, has prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to include the province in a worldwide survey on causes and prevention of suicide, says Slavica Selakovic Bursic, professor of psychiatry at Novi Sad University.

"Within our local research in the past months we came to the another horrifying number – each suicide is accompanied by 10 failures," said Selakovic Bursic, the representative of Serbia & Montenegro at the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).

Vojvodina is trying to tell its people not to kill themselves. Several emergency phone services have been opened since January this year.

"With the major reform of the health care system now we have commissions for mental health and funds for counselling over special phone lines," Sagi says.In Hungary, across the border, the suicide rate is close at 27 per 100,000. Hungary had topped the suicide rate in this region for decades, but others are now killing themselves more compared to Hungarians.

For decades also, it was the ethnic Hungarians in Subotica who topped the list of suicides in that part of Serbia. For some time suicide was believed to have been linked to ethnicity. Now about half the cases are of Serbs.

Men overwhelmingly hang themselves, while women prefer tablets, Sagi says. "Causes are deep, combined," he says. "It’s the combination of genetics and environment that leads to this final act."

Some theories suggest that genetics accounts for 40 percent of suicides. But alcoholism, old age, loneliness or cancer at an advanced stage have led many people to end their lives in Vojvodina region, experts say.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report on ‘Violence as a Global Health Problem’ says suicides account for almost half of all violent deaths around the world.

"Every 40 seconds a person commits suicide," the report says. "Out of 1,635,000 violent deaths each year, 815,000 are suicides, 520,000 homicides and 300,000 are war-related deaths," the report says.

The report says also that a "startling rise in suicides has been reported in Eastern European and former Soviet countries." Lithuania topped this list with 52 suicides per 100,000 people, followed by Latvia and Russia (43).

WHO figures for Western Europe put the number of suicides at five per 100,000. The rate is 4.1 per 100,000 in North America, and 3.1 in per 100,000 in Africa.

Records show that a third of people who committed suicide had sought help from doctors.

"Signs of suicidal behaviour should not be neglected," says Aleksandra Milicevic Kalasic, a psychiatrist from the mental health commission at the Health Ministry. "Prevention should be more widespread, with the education of both doctors and the population. It’s a problem for all of us."