The 'quiet epidemic' of increasing suicides among French farmers

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The most recent available statistics, made public in 2016 by France’s public health institute, show that 985 farmers killed themselves from 2007 to 2011, a suicide rate 22 percent higher than that of the general population and to a backdrop of increasing economic hardship among rural populations, while the real numbers are feared to be greater still because of suicides not officially declared by doctors.

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A dairy farmer, Jean-Pierre Le Guelvout, once kept 66 cows at a thriving estate in southern Brittany. But falling milk prices, accumulating debts, depression and worries about his heath in middle age became too much to bear, reports The New York Times.

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