Crete has highest suicide rates in the country
The island of Crete has occupied the top place in the list of Greek regions with the highest suicide rates for the last 25 years, according to an expert.
From 1999 to 2013, the number of suicides per 100,000 people in the population was 2.4 for Greece, and 5.2 for Crete, a report published in 2018 in BMC Psychiatry, an open-access journal for research into psychiatric disorders, revealed.
“Our experience shows that most suicides on Crete are linked to mental illness, with serious cases often being undiagnosed, and even if they are, there’s no strict follow-up,” says Dr Alexandros Vgontzas, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Crete, director of the Sleep Research and Treatment Center in Penn State College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, and leader of the team that wrote the report.
2022 was a record year, with 97 suicides recorded on the island.
Kyriakos Katsadoros, scientific director of the Suicide Observatory Klimaka, said four people took their own lives on the island so far this year.
