Japan fears post-quake rise in suicides
Officials are concerned that a lingering sense of hopelessness among quake victims may drive them to take their own lives. Authorities have provided hotlines, therapy and counseling in hopes of averting more deaths.
Reporting from Tokyo— Naoko Sugimoto has heard the news through the nation's fledgling mental health grapevine, ominous reports of suicides in the region devastated by last month's magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami. It's a trickle she fears may soon become a river: the farmer who hanged himself, distressed about a cabbage harvest ruined by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant; the overworked government worker near the complex who took his life; the father who killed himself after a fruitless search for his child after the tsunami. "I feel sorry for these people in the same way I do for those who died in the tsunami," said Sugimoto, 67, who heads a national suicide support group, Izoku Shien. "But they didn't die in the tsunami; they died afterward. They took their own lives. And that makes you ask yourself, 'What could we have done?'"