Pills and medications often serve only to control symptoms, not resolve deeper issues. Depressed individuals are more likely to consider suicide, for instance. Stress brought on by coping with hectic lifestyle is commonplace; when self-medication of old often led to alcoholism, today we have dependence on painkillers, other meds. Winston Churchill famously drove away his “black dog” of depression with a daily bottle of whisky, today he’d be placed by his MD on quo diem lithium. For suicidal patients, however, medicine has yet to find a fail-safe prescription.
Recent revelations that the incidence of suicide in the U.S. armed forces has greatly increased, in large part to the stresses present in modern warfare, have once again focused attention on the whys of taking one’s life. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is very often experienced by those who have seen war. This from not only a military, but, importantly, civilian perspective. While enlisted women and men have the advantage of turning to psychologists, psychiatrists for help, civilian survivors of war and all its ugly side effects often have no such luxury.
International NGOs such as the World Health Organization (WHO) monitor national suicide levels as an indicator of the general health of a people. While genetic predisposition, climatic influences and even diet have been studied there is no clear-cut evidence available as to why some people more than others see suicide as the only solution to their woes. Most certainly stress is an important contributing factor. How else to explain that suicide rates globally are highest in the developed countries?
Nowhere is the situation as dire as in our neck of the woods. Recent statistics show that Lithuanians are now the undisputed leaders in this grisly category — 44 out of every 100,000 chose their own road out. Russia ranks second with 39, Estonia third with 38, Latvia just missed this dubious podium with 36. In comparison the average in the European Union is 20, Canada 14, and in the U.S, even allowing for the recent spike, 12.5. Such statistics rather obviously suggest that something is very specifically wrong with the psychological health of Balts.
Alcoholism was once seen as the cause. It was an issue that Gorbachev addressed in the Soviet Union, to decidedly mixed results. Now it is the communist system itself that is to be blamed. Just as the high-pressure lifestyle of Western capitalist countries has created am anti-depressant, anti-anxiety pill swallowing society, countries that have escaped the yoke of totalitarian rule drow their sorrows in moonshine and vodka. Still, the question remains — what precisely drives a man — for the majority of alcoholics and suicides are men — to drink and taking one’s life?
Lithuanian journalist Rokas Tracevskis, now working at the Lithuanian Genocide and Research Centre in Vilnius is disturbed by these figures. Writing in Transitions Online (April 9), Tracevskis argues that this extremely high suicide rate is the legacy of Stalin and his successors. Indeed, we are nations with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. He cites Anton Leenaars, a professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and a world-famous expert on suicide. There is numerical evidence that the Soviet experience accounts for the record rates in the Baltic states. “There was no difference between Lithuania and the rest of Europe in the suicide rate before the Soviet occupation” Leenaars notes. Private psychologist Grazina Guidate concurs: nightmares of Soviets coming to conduct pogroms, deport people, execute relatives are common complaints of patients in her private practice.
Tracevskis notes that some 600,000 Balts were taken from their homes by the Soviets and imprisoned or deported. At the time the combined population of the Baltic republics was 10 million. This figure is the equivalent of 20 million Americans or 5 million Brits being put in jail. And it was tragedy that involved more than one generation: in Lithuania alone 39,000 children were deported. This applies equally to Estonia and Latvia. There is nary a Balt who has not suffered directly or indirectly under Soviet repression.
The unpredictable, even absurd nature of the communist system meant that there was public and a private reality. A sense of insecurity dominated both, accounting for alcoholism as a temporary escape route. Taking the permanent way out suggests that fear persists — even today people still are afraid to talk about the past. This is surfacing in Lithuania when researchers go to the countryside to collect memories of the forced land nationalization.
If this were America, pills would be pushed. If this were America, litigators would sue the Soviet system. If this were America, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer would be searching the nation’s soul for answers.
But there are no easy answers for the Baltic people. What is certain is that part of the Stalinist legacy is a high suicide rate, a direct cause of psychological trauma that is now embedded in the make-up of the nation.
What was once seen as a private trauma has now become a national trauma. Sadly, it remains to be seen how many generations will pass before suicide issues in the Baltics are resolved.