Brendan D. Murphy, Contributor
Waking Times

Lockdown Taking a Brutal Toll

Suicide and Mental Health: More Reasons Why Lockdowns Don’t Add Up

In Part 1 of this series I highlighted the adverse effects of social distancing and isolation – psychological, social, and physiological (including decreased immunity to viruses!)

Let’s hone in on suicide and mental health now while we “flatten the curve.”

In March, Lifeline’s telephone counselling service smashed its 57 year record, receiving more than 90,000 calls for help.

More than half of all callers were wanting to talk about concerns or anxiety about the COVID-19 health crisis with the busiest day being the Good Friday public holiday where 3197 calls were logged.

Lifeline is now receiving a call every 30 seconds at its 40 centres across Australia, many of which are located in regional, rural and remote locations. There has been a 25 per cent increase in demand for telephone counselling services.

Lifeline centres provide mental health education, face to face counselling and therapeutic groups for people at-risk, or bereaved, by suicide.

Kelly Saidey, the suicide and prevention manager for Lifeline Mid Coast, said the community is struggling under the impacts of COVID-19 which are mirrored through the emotions of grief and loss.[i]

Almost the whole planet has just been engineered into the early stages of a Depression because of the over-inflated doom prognostications of our controlled mass media and corrupt transnational entities like the W.H.O., the biggest funder of which is now Bill Gates, following Trump’s savvy decision to cancel the USA’s contribution.

It is obvious, even at a glance, that we are creating a socio-economic situation in many countries that is already producing enormous strain and anguish for many millions of people, forcing unprecedented numbers of people onto government handouts and into levels of hardship most have never known.

Many of those people reduced to poverty will—unless we reverse the extreme measures taken to “flatten the (already tiny) curve”—likely be at significantly increased risk of suicide.

It’s already well known that suicide rates increase in times of economic strife and uncertainty. Previous research estimates that the 2007 economic crisis in Europe and North America led to more than 10,000 extra suicides. And findings from last year show that suicides increase both in years of significant stock index decline and in the year that follows it.[i]

Notice that these are actual REAL deaths, not putative, anticipated deaths that may or may not happen due to a “dangerous pathogen” (which, by the way, has not EVER been shown to have have fulfilled Koch’s postulates, which is sort of a problem if you want to believe the official narrative, but more on that later).

Our corrupt and incompetent governments appear to be cutting off society’s nose to spite its face—by destroying millions of people’s lives and income—and the very fabric of modern society in order to “protect” us.

Even the pathologically PC The Conversation website concedes,

Inevitably, the crisis will cause the economy to further contract and the scale of the dip in economic activity could be unprecedented in peacetime – decimating the quality of life and labour market prospects of the young in particular.[ii]

Is the cure worse than the disease?

The numbers say yes (but I’m not getting into the bogus manipulated data that has been used to push the pandemic narrative here—let’s just focus here in Part 2 on the so-called merits of the counter-measures we’ve taken against this enigmatic respiratory condition).

John Keyhoe of the Australian Financial Review chimes in with, “A younger generation of working Australians are making enormous sacrifices to protect the health of – overwhelmingly but not exclusively – older Australians…”[iii]

The sacrifices are both fiscal, social, physiological, and psychological.

The mental health impact of the lockdown is already being felt and can only worsen if we persist with such extreme measures against a virus that has never fulfilled Koch’s postulates.

Australian National University head of mental health policy Sebastian Rosenberg says the country’s “broken” mental health system is going to come under intense pressure.

“We know there are very strong links between unemployment and mental illness. Isolation is the enemy of mental health.”[iv]

As Parnell McGuiness also with the Australian Financial Review, writes,

“The restrictions imposed…are expected to result in over a million unemployed people. For a portion this will turn into long-term unemployment, typically defined as unemployment lasting over six months. Long-term unemployment is associated with poorer health and reduced life expectancy.

When a million or more people are expected to be out of work for six months, the health impacts of this are likely to be significant.”[v]

There are also concerns that with the lockdown in place, increased use of social media may result in more self-harm and suicides in young people; boys may begin catching up to girls as they are driven off the sporting field and indoors to their devices and social media.[vi]

Then there’s the working class.

A 2008 study by Chang et al., found, “After the 2008 economic crisis, rates of suicide increased in the European and American countries studied, particularly in men and in countries with higher levels of job loss.”[vii]

There were an estimated 4884 excess suicides in 2009 compared with the number expected based on previous trends—mainly in men in the 27 European and 18 American countries.

A 2011 study on the impact of business cycles on suicide rates found suicide rates in the US rose during the Great Depression until they peaked in 1932, the last full year of it.[viii]

Looks like the next few years will be dire unless we start working from real evidence instead of panic-driven media narratives and heavily manipulated data. How about we flatten the curve on this front – before it really steepens?

In a 2018 study involving 36 countries and spanning several decades, the authors’ results suggested “that suicides increase both in years of significant stock index decline and in the year that follows it. This prolonged reaction suggests that it may be possible to use stock market indicators to predict how likely it is that more people will kill themselves in the months following a crash.”[ix] (Emphasis added)

A 2016 study on suicide rates in Milan, Italy, in relation to economic and other factors found that people with a serious physical or mental disease were 3 times more likely to suicide than the remainder of the population in dire economic times:

“If [cognitive and emotional] barriers [against external threats] are weakened by severe psychological or physical disease, or by the lack of a stable emotional life (being without a partner), people become more vulnerable to structural economic pressures. This pressure, often worsened by the media, can instill feelings of social distress and insecurity.”[x]

A 2018 article in BMC Psychiatry reported an overview:

Studies in European Union countries conducted during the recent economic crisis period have found associations between suicide mortality rates (SMRs) and unemployment. In Greece, according to published reports, SMRs have been on a remarkable upward trend up to 40%.

In 2011 a brief report in Lancet suggested a 40% rise in suicides in the first half of 2011 compared to 2010. Kontaxakis et al. reported that in the decade between 2001 and 2011 SMRs increased by 38.4%, with women showing the highest rise (69.6% as compared to 33.1% among men). In a similar vein, another recent study reported a 35% increase in suicides between 2010 and 2012, with unemployment being significantly associated with suicide mortality, especially among men of working-age, which coincided with austerity measures.

In another study it was suggested that fiscal austerity measures and negative economic growth were related to significantly increased male SMRs, whereas fiscal austerity affected mostly the population between 45 and 89 years of age.[xi]

Melanie Haiken offered something of a potential preview of things to come in a 2014 article:

A dramatic spike in suicides between 2008 and 2010 can be linked with the economic crisis, according to a study published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Researchers from the University of Oxford compared suicide data from before  2007 with the years of the crisis and found more than 10,000 “economic suicides” associated with the recession across the U.S., Canada and Europe.

‘There has been a substantial rise in suicides during the recession, considerably more than we would have expected based on previous trends,” says lead author Aaron Reeves, a postdoctoral researcher in the sociology department at Oxford University.

And, says senior author David Stuckler, also of Oxford: “Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg. These data reveal a looming mental health crisis in Europe and North America.”[xii]

If you’re wondering, major depressions occur roughly once every hundred years—so we are “due” for one (ta-da, here’s “COVID-19” right on cue!).

The question is this: Is wilfully engineering the Great Depression 2.0 really a valid response—if it kills more people than it “saves” and creates untold hardship, poverty, ill-health (physical and psychological), and domestic violence the world over?

In the American study “overall suicide rate and the suicide rates of the groups aged 25 to 34 years, 35 to 44 years, 45 to 54 years, and 55 to 64 years rose during [economic] contractions and fell during expansions.” Ages 65-74 and 75+ did not follow the trend—but this time conditions are different.

The Great Depression did not feature the added bonus of the current truly Draconian elimination of the right to socialise and associate freely, or to leave your home and travel freely—perhaps to the beach to get some immune-supporting sunshine and sea air with its negative ions.

The Great Depression did not see the police turn into vampiric tax collectors fining little old ladies on park benches as they minded their own business and bothered no one. Nor were choppers sent out to remote wilderness areas to harass a couple camping in the bush (only in Australia, folks).

The Great Depression did not see people swallowing terabytes of government propaganda inducing them to view their friends and neighbours with suspicion and fear—and even snitch on them, Soviet style!

The Great Depression lacked the psychological terrorisation of the populace through Stasi-like police behaviour, and ENDLESS government-media fear-porn about a condition that many are now characterising as “just another flu” (the numbers are lower than previous years) or, in some cases, something altogether different that in no way resembles a transmissible respiratory disease.

The Great Depression did not have medical “authorities” at the W.H.O threatening—in their own words—”to enter homes and remove family members” in order to impose isolation on them.

What kind of world are we engineering here?

All to “flatten the curve” of a condition which has yet to fulfil Koch’s postulates, failed to reach pandemic numbers, and the data pertaining to which is of the sketchiest variety we have seen in medicine in a long time.

It seems like we are the subjects of a vast and disturbing social experiment on humanity’s willingness to  keep bending over and taking it from the State—no matter how illogical and tyrannical their invented rules—or bogeymen—become.

We are told to “Stay home,” but for whose benefit ultimately?

Do the tangible, measurable negatives outweigh the putative benefits? Where is the solid, empirical evidence to back the assertion that current measures are actually working? (Aside from the contrived numbers, that is.)

No one furnishes it, they merely keep parroting the standardised rhetoric formulated by the W.H.O., Bill Gates, Fauci (Gates’ man on the inside), and other low-level hapless political minions who may be aptly dubbed “useful idiots”…

I also include any police enforcing “social distancing” and “just following orders” in the latter category. You are culpable – the Nazis at Nuremberg learnt that the hard way.

The mass media-pharma-government complex would have us believe that if we just shut up and obey, and wait for Bill “21^st Century Medical Messiah” Gates to provide the covid-19 wonder vaccine, and don’t question anything (conspiracy theorist!), all will eventually be well.

Right?

But did you know that the W.H.O. did not declare a global pandemic until the day AFTER Bill Gates “donated” a large sum of money to it? Gates is salivating at the prospect of global forced COVID-19—and other—vaccinations, and he stands to make billions from the scheme if his manipulative tactics continue unfoiled.

Trump made a correct strategic call in pulling funding from the W.H.O.—he clearly recognises, to some extent at least, the manipulation playing out, and wants no part of it. Instead, he is preparing to restore some semblance of normality to America and avoid the coming multi-layered disaster countries like Australia now invite upon themselves. Are you listening, “Scomo”?

Did you also know that the (manipulated) rates of infection never ACTUALLY reached pandemic levels? But that didn’t stop the W.H.O. from declaring it after Bill’s “donation.” (Due to the constant and intensive manipulation, we will never have real data anyway, which should give one pause for thought.)

Nothing to see here!

Gates, Fauci, and others have major financial interests in the lockdown and “pandemic” being dragged out as long as possible. It is just sheer naivete and willful ignorance to believe otherwise.

They await a major payday—and WE will be paying even more dearly (like India, Pakistan, and others), if we don’t start paying closer attention.

All despotic regimes rely on the compliance (or feigned blindness) of good people to engineer totalitarianism.

About the Author

Brendan D. Murphy – Co-founder of Global Freedom Movement and host of GFM Radio, Brendan D. Murphyis a leading Australian author, researcher, activist, and musician. His acclaimed non-fiction epic The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science & Spirituality – Book 1 is out now! Come and get your mind blown at www.brendandmurphy.net

[i] Tracey Fairhurst, Call for help every 30 seconds, http://www.portnews.com.au/story/6744778/call-for-help-every-30-seconds-record-demand-for-lifeline-support/?fbclid=IwAR1EXXNChzH830KyHytw-eNJPUblM0syxtXnufKFflNHwiVKGQOyRJOJu8Y

[ii] Bad economic news increases suicide rates, research shows, http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/bad-economic-news-increases-suicide-rates-new-research/

[iii] Coronavirus: why lockdown may cost young lives over time, http://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-lockdown-may-cost-young-lives-over-time-134580

[iv] John Keyhoe, Coronavirus shutdown has human costs, http://www.afr.com/policy/economy/coronavirus-shutdown-has-human-costs-20200325-p54do9

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Parnell McGuiness, Lockdowns will kill people too, http://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/lockdowns-will-kill-people-too-20200331-p54fi9

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Shu-Sen Chang,  David Stuckler, Paul Yip, David Gunnell, Impact of 2008 global economic crisis on suicide: time trend study in 54 countries, BMJ, http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239

[ix] Feijun Luo, Curtis S. Florence, Myriam Quispe-Agnoli, Lijing Ouyang, and Alexander E. Crosby, Impact of Business Cycles on US Suicide Rates, 1928–2007, American Journal of Public Health. 2011 June; 101(6): 1139–1146.

[x] Stock market crashes linked to higher rates of suicide – new research, http://theconversation.com/stock-market-crashes-linked-to-higher-rates-of-suicide-new-research-101917

[xi] Isabella Merzagora et al, Suicide Risk and the Economic Crisis: An Exploratory Analysis of the Case of Milan, PLoS One. 2016; 11(12): e0166244, 2016 Dec 29, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5199046/

[xii] Basta et al., ‘Suicide rates in Crete, Greece during the economic crisis: the effect of age, gender, unemployment and mental health service provision’, http://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-018-1931-4

[xiii] Melanie Haiken, More Than 10,000 Suicides Tied To Economic Crisis, Study Says, http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/06/12/more-than-10000-suicides-tied-to-economic-crisis-study-says/#564216c87ae2

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