From the NY Times: On New Year’s Eve, Antonio Tamiozzo, 53,
hanged himself in the warehouse of his construction business near Vicenza,
after several debtors did not pay what they owed him. Three weeks earlier, Giovanni Schiavon, 59, a
contractor, shot himself in the head at the headquarters of his debt-ridden
construction company on the outskirts of Padua. As he faced the bleak prospect
of ordering Christmas layoffs at his family firm of two generations, he wrote a
last message: “Sorry, I cannot take it anymore.”
The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last
three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading
to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations
like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are
increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers
have started calling “suicide by economic crisis…..”
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