Window on Eurasia

Moscow’s Middle Class Now Said to Be a Suicide ‘Risk Group’

Paul Goble

July 6, 2006 – The overall number of suicides declined in both Moscow and the Russian Federation as a whole over the last year, but psychologists there now classify the capital’s middle class along with teenagers and older people as a group whose members are particularly at risk of taking their own lives.

Sergei Tiunov, a psychologist who works for Moscow’s Committee on
Family and Youth Affairs, said that one of the reasons for this
assessment is that many middle class Muscovites involved in business
have lives full of “colossal” emotional and physical tensions,
Newsru.com reported yesterday.

Tiunov’s comments came on the heels of a report carried in “Novyye
izvestiya” that the number of suicides in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and
indeed, the Russian Federation as a whole had declined over the past
year, although even these declines did not drop Russia out of the top
five countries of the world in terms of this measure.

During the first four months of 2006, 289 Muscovites committed suicide,
down from 326 in the same period in 2005. For the Russian Federation as
a whole, the total for the first four months this year was 12,900, down
from 14,000 during the January through April period in 2005.

Vladimir Voytsekh, the director of the Serbskiy Institute’s research
center on suicides, said that in his opinion, these declines are
“connected with thes tabilization of the life of society. This is
oil. And if the flow of oil were to stop, then life would again become worse
and the number of suicides would again increase.”

Voytsekh’s linkage of a reduction in the number of suicides to economic growth in the country, a linkage that scholars in many countries sometimes point to, makes the decision of Tiunov and other Moscow psychologists to classify members of the Russian middle class as being at particular risk especially interesting.

Another Moscow specialist, Ol’ga Mezhenina, who works at the World of
Your I center provided an explanation. People get used to poverty, she
said, but those who gain something and thus have something to lose –
be it as a result of business machinations or changes in the exchange
rate – often become inconsolably depressed.

Their family and friends could help, but often those who are depressed
find themselves isolated from one or the other, she continued, noting
that approximately half of those who turn to the Psychological
Asssistance Center have problems with other members of their families.

Those living in Moscow and St.Petersburg could turn to the services of
psychiatrists and psychotherapists, she continued, but this is not happening. The reason is that many in their 30s and 40s who are most at
risk remain “under the influence of the Soviet stereotype that turning to [a mental health professional] is shameful.”

The Newsru.com report also provided data on suicide rates in some of
the country’s regions. Koryakia, in the Russian Far East, had the highest
rate, 113.5 suicides per 100,000 residents, followed closely by the
Komi, Altai and Nenets Republics, all extremely isolated areas.

The regions with the lowest suicide rates, on the other hand, were not
those that have made the greatest economic progress or that have the
lowest rates of unemployment but rather those with traditional and
often Muslim societies. Ingushetia has the lowest rate of all, 1.1 suicides
per 100,000, with Daghestan following at 3.2 per 100,000.

Such variations in suicide rates by class and ethnicity will further
complicate albeit in a relatively limited way President Vladimir
Putin’s efforts to address what from the perspective of many Russian
officials and analysts is that country’s worsening demographic
situation

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