Increasing concerns are being expressed within Greenland, the country with the highest suicide rate in the world. The rate in Greenland is 24 times that of the United States.
Most at risk are the young, as in many countries it is the teenage and young adult population that are most likely to kill themselves. In bus stations and on school walls posters encourage the young to call the suicide hotline: “The call is free. No one is alone. Don’t be alone with your dark thoughts. Call.”
While males tend to dominate statistics, a survey from 2008 showed alarmingly that one in four of all young women had attempted to take her life as reported by Siku News.
Danish analysis has revealed that the trend towards suicide has been a recent one in Greenland. Up until the mid-twentieth century most Greenlanders existed as they had done for thousands of years. The society was very much a hunter-gatherer community centred on small hamlets along the rugged coastline. Statistics from the early part of the century indicate Greenland was amongst the lowest in world suicide rates.
However, 1970 was a watershed year when the suicide rate began to rise, a trend that has continued to this day. By the end of the 1980s several towns reported suicide as the leading cause of death in young adults.
According to Peter Bjerregaard, a researcher at Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health, nearly all suicides from 1970 were from people born after 1950. That year represented a landmark social change for Greenland as it launched its transformation into a welfare state backed by Danish resettlement and modern aid. The move to bring Greenland into the future seems to have brought one of the developed world’s most tragic causes of death with it.
The high suicide rate has also been attributed to most deaths being from shooting or hanging, with up to 90 percent of suicides committed in this highly efficient fashion.
Has there been any recent updates to the study? Are suicides up, down or unchanged?
As opposed to the welfare state, could it be more about the global economic meltdown and the fallout from that?
-C
Perhaps the “modernization” of Greenland is a factor, but I would guess that to limit any discussion or investigation to that as the sole factor would hinder any effort to reduce the problem.
Surely there are other factors involved.
Youth suicide is a big problem here in New Zealand too. I’m not sure how the figures compare but I believe that focusing on the solution of activity seems to be a better option than focusing on the problem of depression.
Just my 2 cents worth
Ray
It would seem to be extraordinary that an increased suicide rate could be due to the introduction of a welfare site. At the very least one would think that the reverse would be true. My understanding was that a relatively high suicide rate was common in Scandinavian countries – one wonders whether a similar pattern of increase since 1950 has occurred elsewhere where these social changes happened earlier.
It also depends on what we mean with modernization. We give is such a wonderful benefit. What opportunity do people have? Is welfare a setup where one can’t take advantage of opportunity because they are a slave of the state. Who knows but freedom has been stifle with the big brother who decides what you need and how you are going to live while big brother lives lavishly on the backs on all the people being taken care of.