Suicide rates in Europe

Finally I found the time to write something again. The writing is actually not the problem it's the researching that takes a lot of time - and I do have to do some research, I don't know all the murder rates by heart ;)
so, I promised in my last post that this time I would check out suicide rates...well, here's what I found out:
It actually took quite some time to find out anything as for example the WHO data is very old (in some countries from the 1990s) but good old EUROSTAT helped me out. They have a table which includes numbers separated by sex, but unfortunately several countries are only shown with old numbers and others are missing completely. But this is the gist (for 2007): The European Union average was 9.8 suicides per 100.000 inhabitants that year. Countries that were significantly below this rate were Greece with 2.6 and Cyprus with 2.2, followed by the UK with 6.1, Malta with 6.0, Italy with 5.2 and Spain with 6.1. Now, apart from the UK these are obviously all mediterranean countries...does the weather really have such a significant effect on suicide rates? Several studies concerning the relation of climate and suicide can be found on the web. It seems that scientiests have agreed on the fact that suicide rates usually peak arounf late spring and early summer...which does not at all support the idea that the hot and sunny weather of the South prevents higher suicide rates! well, unfortunately I do not have the time to read through all those studies but this is a very confusing and interesting find!
Usually you would think that prosperity and personal well-being are most important to keep you from becoming suicidal. This should place the Scandinavian countries on the lower end of this list, but it's quite the contrary: Norway (10.0), Iceland (11.5), Sweden (11.4) and Denmark (10.6) have slightly above average rates while Finland with 17.6 is amongst the most suicidal countries in Europe. This would support the idea that the weather, or rather climate, can influence suicide rates. But why the difference between Finland and the other northern countries?
The climate is about the same but Finland does have an alcohol problem. It had become the main cause of adult death recently and obviously alcoholism does not exactly prevent suicide.
(Another country I would connect with a happy and well-off population has a very high rate: Switzerland with 15.1!)
Now let's have a look at the Eastern European countries: They have all above average rates that range from 9.5 (Bulgaria) and 10.5 (Romania) to as high as 18.4 (Slovenia) and 21.4 (Hungary). The relatively high rates for the whole region could be related to low economic and social development compared to other regions of Europe. Why there are so stark differences between the Eastern countries themthelves though I have no idea...
The region with the highest numbers overall are the Baltic states though. All three of them have high suicide rates, from 16.9 (Estonia) to 17.8 (Latvia) to 28.4 (Lithuania) which makes Lithuania by far the most suicidal country in Europe (ten years ago the rate was as high as 46)!

While surfing the web I stumbled across a very good blog article about exactly the same topic...I have only read it after writing my own post, because I didn't want to run the risk of copying everything. Also I had decided to concentrate on Europe while the author of this blog has included numbers from countries from all over the world and compared the suicide rates with happiness rates of these countries. A very interesting point, so check it out if you want to read more about suicide rates!
You can find it at http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/suicide-rates-of-the-world/