Gestor bibliográfico Crisis y Salud

Lopez Bernal et al.1 detected a suicide rate trend, between 2005 and 2010, of a 0.3% decrease per month and, above this underlying trend, an 8% increase in Spanish suicide rates since the financial crisis using an interrupted time-series analysis. However, their model considers the economic crisis as an event that occurred suddenly in March 2008, so there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ that date with regard to monthly suicide rates. The authors decided that 1 April 2008 is the precise date of the ‘economic hurricane’ in Spain. According to the most usual definition of economic recession (two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real gross domestic product calculated as annual rate of change), the aftermath of the economic crisis in Spain was not in the second quarter of 2008, but at the first quarter of 2009.