FROM “Man up, you can’t be depressed just because this happened!” TO “Why are you looking so sad and tired? Are you depressed? You can talk to me if you want..”
To begin with, according to the World Bank dataset on development indicators, it is clear that men’s average suicide mortality rate is significantly higher than females.
Surprisingly, males are three times more suicidal than females, reaching an average of 14.3 male suicides per 100,000 males, while 4.4 female suicides per 100,000 females.
But why is this the case?
While comparing countries with high unemployment rates and countries with low unemployment rates, the following analyses were investigated:
To begin with, in Countries with highest unemployment rates, the suicide mortality rates for both men and women are higher.
However, when faced with difficult economic situations:
Females suicide mortality rates were higher by 150%
Males suicide mortality rates were higher by 217%
This leads to the conclusion that men’s mental health tends to be more susceptible to financial burdens.
So, what should be done?
A potential solution would be providing unemployment benefits, which are governmental compensations that are provided for unemployed people. These compensations help secure a stable income after the layoff of an employee, and they improve unemployed people’s productivity in the labor market by improving job matching and connecting employees to employers.
In addition, this solution can be helpful in mitigating the impact of unemployment on the psychological wellbeing of people.
As the following illustration shows, both females’ and males’ suicide mortality rates are higher in countries with loweradequacy and coverage of unemployment benefits
More specifically, males’ suicide rates are 31% lower in countries with high adequacy and coverage of unemployment benefits.
Thus, in order to mitigate the males’ suicide mortality, several recommendations are suggested to be effective.
First, it is highly recommended that suicide prevention groups intensify their focus on men and encourage them to express themselves and seek psychological help.
Equally important, in countries with high unemployment rates, governments should work on providing unemployment benefits and ensure their wide coverage of the unemployed.
“I am a failure, I won’t get any job!”
Have you ever heard someone saying this?
Have you maybe even been that person?
Losing employment is one of life’s most stressful experiences.
Aside from the obvious financial distress it can cause, losing a job can also take a heavy toll on one’s mood, relationships, and overall mental and emotional health.
Societal costs of high unemployment include poverty, homelessness, physical and mental illness, decline in life satisfaction, higher crime and a reduced rate of volunteerism.
Thus, fighting unemployment is one of the world biggest challenges. Some countries could achieve major improvements by producing more goods and services in a given time frame (i.e. one year). In other words, they could achieve lower unemployment rate by increasing the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Nowadays, countries having low unemployment rate such as USA and China have the world’s highest GDP, whereas in South Africa where the unemployment rate is much higher, the GDP is relatively low as shown in the visualizations below:
Who is responsible?
Increasing the country’s GDP is an effective solution of the unemployment issue because of the job opportunities it creates. This can be achieved by promoting education, developing new technologies, improving infrastructure including roads, schools, hospitals, phone lines, transport, electricity, Internet, water supply…
It is also recommended to adopt more flexible working practices: people could choose to work fewer hours, giving the chance to raise employment in the economy and resulting in unemployed population getting a part time job.
Fighting unemployment is a difficult long journey and the contribution of both private and public sector is mandatory in order to make it happen.
My morning dark coffee was mixed lately with the sorrowful news regarding the collapse of the Lebanese economy. People are losing their jobs, their purchasing power, and even their hope to rise again. I felt for a couple of times that we are powerless and it’s the time to accept that hope is only a way to package the melancholic truth.
In my attempt to find any light inside the deep dark hole that we are inside, I remembered the metaphor of Lebanese phoenix that I heard about during the 2006 July war. Phoenix is the bird who can arise from the aches according to Greek mythology. Beirut, the capital of the old country, like the phoenix, was rebuilt more than seven times according to legend. So, to strengthen the glimpse of hope with actual reality, I searched for a recent stage where Lebanon was rising. I surprised when I found that between 1950 and 1974, Lebanon was in a golden stage with a GPD per capita is greater than many developed counties nowadays! So, my current concern becomes while drinking my morning coffee is how we can make the Lebanese phoenix rise again?
Note: I created this graph using tableau software based on the data from Maddison Project Database 2018.
Countries face a huge loss due to unemployment. In order to find a solution for unemployment, we searched for the factors causing it. As shown below, gender discrimination, country’s GDP, distribution of jobs among the economic sectors, and educational level have a huge impact on Unemployment.Above,you can alter the regions you want to analyze from using multiple values drop-down.
In Conclusion:
-As GDP increase the Unemployment rate decrease
-Female Unemployment is higher than the males due to gender discrimination in workplace
-Employment rate is higher in the services sectors which mean that there is no equal job opportunities in between sectors causing higher
unemployment
-If the educational level is more advanced, their is lower unemployment rate
Data Source: https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators
While comparing countries with high unemployment rates and countries with low unemployment rates, the following analyses were investigated:
