That's because in Japan a number of people actually work to death. Laeve work 11pm get up at 5am work on weekends.... Those people feel an obligation to do that, occasionally you get the odd person who dies from overwork.
So they have that statistic out of necessity. It's a common enough phenomenon.
I would say that reasoning is a little suspect. This is often considered a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, but there's a growing body of work suspecting that isn't the case.
In Japan part of the classification involves unlogged or extreme amounts of overtime, something we also have in the US (I have personally worked for years at companies that required a lot of unlogged/unpaid overtime from all of their employees). The cause of death is often stress related heart attack or stroke, again something we also have in the US. We know excessive job stress can cause permanent degenerative damage to the heart. So the fact that the Japanese choose to classify it as work-related and Americans don't doesn't necessarily mean such deaths don't exist in the US, or are necessarily too small to be worth measuring. They just simply aren't measured.
But they also respect people who nap at their desk! In high school I routinely slept in my first two classes (on one day it would be AP Physics, in the other it was AP Stats. I got a 4 in AP Physics). If I was in japanese work culture I would sleep at my desk all day, then do my 7 hours of work, and then shark the natives in Go from 11pm to 5am.
Title suggest causation, but reading the article it sounds like it's a contributing factor to preexisting mental health issues:
"What we see with unemployment is that it increases the risk because it makes already bad situations worse for some people," he said. "Any kind of economic strain or unemployment, to the degree that there are already mental health or substance abuse or relationship problems, can make it worse."
The interesting part is that it's saying that people unused to unemployment are more affected than those where unemployment I common.
So a country region,city where unemployment is already high, becoming unemployed there has less effect than exhibited in an area with traditionally high employment --people not acclimated to unemployment take the experience harder.
Exactly. Depressed people commit suicide, unemployment can exacerbate depression, thus it correlates with suicide rates. Not exactly a new finding but one to remember. More of a "hey look <bad thing> is <really bad>." with some numbers to make it more real to the reader.
In other news, all-cause mortality has been steadily declining in all developed countries throughout our lifetimes,[1] so with that in mind, maybe unemployment today is less dangerous than it ever used to be.
It is also interesting that there have been published pieces showing that most of those gains have been correlated to income. People in the top 50% of income makers are living significantly longer than those in the bottom.
So I would caution against viewing this whole population study as a complete indicator that long-term unemployment is now an insignificant problem.
Yea, it is almost certainly more desperation. If you give someone a stable home, food, power, etc - they will find their own thing to do. It is when you owe thousands in debt, have no income, lost your car, are losing your house, etc that you become depressed and desperate enough to self harm.
I mean, you can have people who have huge downs immediately after losing a job, but someone who has just left unemployment compensation would not be considering suicide if they weren't losing everything.
Though that doesn't seem to cover military/law enforcement or secondary deaths like suicide.
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm