Natural disasters may spark rise in suicides

A new government study documents a marked rise in suicide rates among people who have been victims of floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. And those rates may stay high for months and even years after the disaster has occurred.

The findings accent the need to provide mental health services to disaster victims for long periods after a disaster has struck, say the researchers led by Etienne G. Krug, MD, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

'Though much more information is needed to elucidate fully the reasons why some people commit suicide after a natural disaster, much can be done to prevent or lessen the impact of natural disasters and ultimately to reduce the number of disaster-related suicides,' Krug and colleagues write in a recent article for the New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 338, No. 6, p. 373?378).

The research team studied 377 counties that had been beset by a natural disaster sometime between 1982 and 1989. All those counties were declared to be federal disaster areas. Their combined population was about 19.5 million.

The researchers then determined the suicide rates in each community before the disaster and 48 months after it occurred. They found that suicides increased by 13.8 percent in those communities that had been hit by floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. The overall national suicide rate remained stable during the same time period.

But the duration of those increased suicide rates varied depending on the type of disaster that struck each of the counties studied. The rates of suicide remained high for at least four years after a flood, two years after a hurricane and only a year after an earthquake.

The researchers noted several possible reasons for the high suicide rate among flood victims, including the fact that floods:

? Recur more often than earthquakes, meaning communities could have been hit by a subsequent flood that wasn?t declared a federal disaster but was still highly destructive.

? Cause more destruction than other natural disasters, resulting in four times as many injuries and three times as much financial loss.

? Result in victims taking on loans more than victims of other disasters, which may bring temporary relief but could eventually lead to stressful financial burdens.