French society confronted by extremely high suicide rates

Suicide prevention illustration by Military Health (CC)

A new report on suicide in French prisons adds to existing worries over the nation’s total suicide rates.

The suicide rate in French prisons has risen 15-fold over the last 50 years, from 4 to 19 suicides per 10,000 prisoners between 1960 and 2008. This is an abnormal increase, in excess of the mechanical increases that are to be expected in a steadily rising prison population. Also, prisoners put an end to their lives five to six times more often than free individuals.

Those are just two of the conclusions reached in a collaborative report published yesterday by French national prison authorities and the ‘Institut national d'études démographiques’ (INED).

Related: Suicide in France: An individual or collective responsibility? 

France has thus become the country with the highest prison suicide rates in the whole of the ‘Europe des Quinze’ – the French term for the original 15 European Union member nations. The two EU countries with the lowest rates, Greece and Denmark, have figures of  four and 15 suicides per 10,000 inmates, respectively.

Evidence that these figures are not exponentially due to increasing incarceration rates is summed up by two findings. The first is that whereas the prison population dipped at the end of the 1990s, suicide rates increased. Secondly, as the number of prisoners rose over the years 2002 to 2008, suicide rates dipped slightly, before climbing again.

Another finding shows that suicide is proportionally higher early on in a sentence and is more  likely to occur during remand and pre-trial, during which prisoners are twice as likely to kill themselves compared to those serving their sentence. Also, the risk of suicide increases with the gravity of the crime which the prisoner has committed or is accused of committing.  

The release of this report comes in the midst of a highly charged and ongoing debate on overcrowding in French prisons, which is the highest in Europe. Prison overcrowding has earned France several strong condemnations by the EU which is demanding the situation be rectified, and backing it up with the threat of severe financial penalties if nothing is done.

Ironically, however, that issue may not be too intrinsically related to the suicide rates, because the incidence of suicide is said to be higher amongst those in individual cells. 

The second major development in France’s suicide rate debate is what is called the “France Télécom Suicides.” 

This highly publicized and bitterly debated issue has to do with what are alleged by some to be abnormally high suicide rates among employees of the massive telephone and communications company, which employs just under 200,000 people worldwide, 102,000 of which are situated in France.

There have been 32 suicides in just under two years at the company, and many failed attempts. The question being asked is “How many of these suicides are due to work pressure and how many are due to personal life issues?”

Notwithstanding that the figures are slightly lower than the national average, France Télécom employees are insisting that they should be much lower, and not just a little lower, than the national average, since suicide generally occurs more often among older people and the unemployed. They also point to much lower suicide rates among France Télécom employees in other countries.

Currently, the issue of suicide is very much on the French mind. When someone commits suicide, or tries to, at France Télécom, the media publicize the story very prominently and days of divided debate follow. Many observers are worried about the possible “national psychosis” aspects of the regular suicide news reports.

The publication of the prison suicide report, coming in the midst of the France Télécom issue, will likely heighten demands that French authorities begin tackling what is being seen as a serious problem in French society that has been ignored for many years.

That may happen soon.

There has been strong initial reaction to the prison report within France. For the first time this very proud country is openly using international comparison data on suicide rates to highlight the situation.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) issues figures on suicide rates by country, but  does not put them in a “low to high” order. In an adapted version of WHO’s  2008 survey of 104 countries, WHO findings demonstrate that France has the 20th highest rate of suicide worldwide in terms of suicides per 100,000 people. That makes France one of the most suicide-prone of almost all major and developing countries combined, with the notable exceptions of Belgium and Japan. By comparison, Canada is 40th, the USA 44th and the United Kingdom 67th.

France has one of the highest standards of living on earth and a much-vaunted healthcare system, generally acknowledged as second-to-none in its quality of care and health issue follow-up for the population as a whole. That’s what makes the high suicide rates so confounding.