'Recessions can hurt, but austerity kills'

In the US, more than five million people have lost access to health care. In Greece, there's a 200% increase in HIV cases. 

 
And in some of the worst-hit countries, suicide rates are up. 

David Stuckler, author of an explosive new book, says the facts speak for themselves.The mass of data they have mined reveals that more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression have been recorded across the two continents since governments started introducing austerity programmes in the aftermath of the crisis.

In the United States, more than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare since the recession began, essentially because when they lost their jobs, they also lost their health insurance. And in the UK, the authors say, 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness following housing benefit cuts.

In terms of "economic" suicides, "Greece has gone from one extreme to the other. It used to have one of Europe's lowest suicide rates; it has seen a more than 60% rise." In general, each suicide corresponds to around 10 suicide attempts and – it varies from country to country – between 100 and 1,000 new cases of depression.

The UK, he says, is "one of the clearest expressions of how austerity kills". Suicides were falling in this country before the recession, he notes. Then, coinciding with a surge in unemployment, they spiked in 2008 and 2009. As unemployment dipped again in 2009 and 2010, so too did suicides. But since the election and the coalition government's introduction of austerity measures – and particularly cuts in public sector jobs across the country – suicides are back.

But based on the actual data, he is in no doubt. "We've seen a second wave – of austerity suicides," he says. "And they've been concentrated in the north and north-east, places like Yorkshire and Humber, with large rises in unemployment. 

Whereas London … We're now seeing polarisation across the UK in mental-health issues." He cites, also, the dire impact on homelessness – falling in Britain until 2010 – of government cuts to social housing budgets, and the human tragedies triggered by the fitness-for-work evaluations, designed to weed out disability benefit fraud.

"What's so particularly tragic about those," he says, "is that the government's own estimates of fraud by persons with disabilities is less than the sum of the contract awarded to the company carrying out the tests."

At least, though, no one in the UK has been denied access to healthcare – yet. Stuckler confesses to being "heartbroken" as what he sees happening to the NHS.

"Britain stood out as the great protector of its people's health in this recession," he says. "By all measures – public satisfaction, quality, access – the UK was at or near the top, and at very low relative cost." But that, he says, is now changing.

"I don't know if people quite realise how fundamental this government's transformation of the NHS is," he says. "And once it's in place, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. 

We haven't yet seen here what can happen when people are denied access to healthcare, but the US system gives us a pretty clear warning."