Occupationless health. "I couldn't stand it any more": suicide and unemployment.

A Welshman who was 40 hanged himself after searching unsuccessfully for work for 10 months. The next day a letter arrived offering him a job. The letter the dead man left said: "I can't go on like this, reading and watching television all day. I'm drinking my unemployment money away." Was it unemployment or poverty that led this man to kill himself or was it alcohol? Or was it a combination of all three or none of them? Such questions are impossible to answer, but even the most casual readers of British newspapers will have noted accounts of inquests where coroners have suggested that people (almost always men) have killed themselves because they could not find jobs. The journalist John Pilger selected 12 such stories from "a much longer list" collected between June 1983 and June 1984.' These accounts do not impress scientists much because there is no proof that unemployment caused these men to kill themselves, but they do impress the public; and they may thus have a bigger effect on politicians than scientific studies because-when the chips are down (and an election is in the offing)-politicians pay more attention to public opinion than to scientists.