ALCOHOL AND SUICIDES IN RUSSIA, UKRAINE AND BELARUS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TRENDS

The Slavic countries of the former Soviet Union (fSU) Russia, Belarus and Ukraine retain one of the highest suicide rates in the world, despite a gradual decline over the past decade. The present study aims to analyze whether population drinking is able to explain the dramatic fluctuations in suicide mortality in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine from the late Soviet to post-Soviet period. Trends in suicide rates and alcohol sales per capita from 1970 to 2014 in Russia Belarus and Ukraine were analyzed employing a Spearman's rank-order correlation analysis. The estimates based on the Soviet data (from 1970 to 1991) suggest a strong association between alcohol sales and suicide rates in Russia (r=0,9; p<0,000), Ukraine (r=0,41; p<0,050) and Belarus (r=0,82; p<0,000). At the same time, the relationship between alcohol sales and suicide rates was negative in the post-Soviet period (from 1992 to 2014) in Russia (r=-0,47; p<0,030), Ukraine (r=-0,94; p<0,000) and Belarus (r=-0,41; p<0,050). The findings from present study suggest that the suicide mortality fluctuations in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the Soviet period were attributable to alcohol. Alternatively, alcohol can not fully explain the fluctuations in the suicide mortality observed in these countries in the Soviet period.