The Top 5 Countries With The Highest Suicide Rate – Why’s Everyone So Down?

#3 Lithuania

Lithuania’s suicide rate is pretty close to South Korea’s at 31.6 people per 100,000. Numbers have doubled in the last decade and the poverty brought on by the Russian economic crisis in 1998 seems not to have helped matters.

Young people in rural areas have moved to the cities in hope of better work and better living standards which has left a generation of rapidly aging, incredibly poor, old people who can no longer work the land due to frailty and illness. About 80% of the suicides seem to be booze related, and everyone drinks heavily in rural areas, where they are also poorest, so the elderly, farming population has been decimated.

#4 Guyana

This nation is the poorest in South America and hits 26.4 suicides per 100,000.

The thing that stands out about Guyanese suicides is that the majority of them are carried out by drinking pesticide. It sounds strange but it makes sense, it’s cheap and freely available in this predominantly agricultural country. Not a nice way to go at all. As we’ve seen elsewhere, poverty can be a big factor, and that certainly goes for here too, but there’s also the added cultural pressures with quite a bit of religious conflict. It’s the East Indian population that is bearing the brunt of these religious and cultural problems and consequently they have the higher suicide rates.

#5 Kazakhstan

At 25.6 suicides per 100,000 people, Kazakhstan comes in at number five on our list and has the highest rates of suicide in the world amongst girls aged 15 – 19 and second in the world for that age group for boys.

The government puts these rates of youth suicide down to bullying at school, absence or loss of values, falling standards of social behavior and exposure of minors to violent images on Television. But that doesn’t really cut it for me. If those were the defining features of suicide we would be much worse off than we are in the UK. No one seems to really know what’s happened here, cash and bullying seem to crop up the most in articles on the matter, but it’s a bit of a mystery.

Hopefully it will slow up of it’s own accord given time.

So there you go, a dismal list of countries not to visit.

â˜› Read Next: Which One Man Has Destroyed The Environment The Most?