Econocide

Suicide seemingly catalyzed by the economic crisis.

“It is the most iconic image of the 1929 Wall Street Crash,” Claire Prentice reported for the BBC, “financiers, having lost their fortunes, jumping to their deaths from the windows of skyscrapers.”

Now, 80 years later, American psychologists have coined the phrase “econocide” to describe a wave of suicides they say is linked to the current global economic crisis.

According to Price, the problem is not restricted to financiers. One doctor told her, “People think econocide is a problem on Wall Street but it is also affecting people on Main Street, ordinary families who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings.”

(The term econocide has also been used to describe decisions with catastrophic economic consequences. In his 1977 book “Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition“ Seymour Drescher argued that abolishing the slave trade in 1807 was tantamount to economic suicide. And in 1999,Business Week used the term to describe the impact of Indonesia’s violent campaign against East Timor: “The chaos militias and the Indonesian army continue to inflict is no less than econocide.”)