Actually in 1897 David Émile Durkheim wrote Suicide, a book about the subject. He exactly identified its cause when widespread. It's the opposite of both of your assumptions.  He coined the phrase used now in sociology, anomie. Anomie is a state of lawlessness and normlessness. It occurs in one of two ways:  1. There are no rules in society or social mores (murder and rape are as legal as eating a donut).  2. There are so many rules people feel they have no choices (authoritarian government).  Anomie is the result more usually of the latter...too much government. The more rules, the more robotic people feel, the more likely they are to kill others or themselves. Anomie is contrasted with anarchy. Anarchy is voluntary government, and as such it is very limited where individual participants wish it to be limited. Where anomie can describe alienation due to complexity in mass society, like Division of Labor (specialization, which is necessary for a society to produce enough to meet basic needs in modernity), anarchy can describe panarchist synthesis (all economic preferences existing simultaneously in the same free territory) and panarchism (competitive legal providers of dispute resolution via contracts in the same geographic area) and therefore inclusion and social bonds based on mutual consent.  Durkheim was a Marxist, believe it or not. He stumbled upon the reason why Marxism would later meet with failure. The only way to enforce theft (taking and redistributing the means of production to workers who did not own them originally) was to have a massive state apparatus. That massive state would always lead to more rules than human psyche was comfortable with, as we all tend toward a preference for autonomy (even if we wish others didn't have it, ironically). This leads to more and more anomie: lawlessness, normlessness, murder, and suicide. China (communist - to a degree still) has always had larger suicide RATES than capitalist nations. The more free market they become, the lower the suicide and murder rates go (you must include government murder in those stats for full accuracy, logically). The more STATE socialist the USA becomes, the more suicide (and murder, once you consider how many people our government is killing here and abroad).  Regardless of economics, however, it is clear that as you approach anomie, you approach more suicide (and usually murder). This has less to do with the economics than the state. Compulsory governments (social contracts that are not EXPLICITLY consented to) have higher suicide rates than stateless societies of the past (please look up suicide research in stateless societies...it's nearly zero). See, it isn't socialism, communism, or free markets that cause suicide...it's the state; ie. STATE capitalism, STATE communism, and STATE socialism. As they leave behind the larval stage of minarchy and head toward gigantic governments of coercion and control filled with rules (and they ALWAYS do), the population heads for anomie.  Anarchy prevents anomie. Overthrowing one state and replacing it with another state does not prevent anomie...it guarantees it.  In chaos theory scientists have identified what causes every closed system to fall to what they call "anarchy" (they are mislableing anomie here). To correct their terminology, we will refer to "chaos" as anomie, since anarchy has laws (competitive) and government (voluntary), while anomie is lawless, normless, violent, and chaotic. What causes closed systems to fall to anomie every single time they are set up is barriers to entry and then the uncontrollable energy needed to feed such a closed system. Eventually such energy needs to keep the system of control going fails. This happens in the human body, computer systems, etc. All will hit a point in the closed system that requires more energy than can be fed in to the system in order to maintain it. This inability to meet energy consumption needs leads to a breakdown of vital systems, and in biology...death.  The state has a life cycle. It always dies because it is a closed system. It becomes closed when it creates barriers to entry into the system on market demanded services like law, defense, roads, welfare, etc. If it didn't create these coerced monopolies of market demanded services, we'd have an open and perpetual system. The only way to destroy such an open system is to close it. Ancient people who lived in statelessness didn't know this...but we do.  So don't think increased suicide is caused by economics...it's caused by STATE control increasing or finally collapsing and no voluntary government being in its place. Don't think our wars for energy resources are over "terrorism" where there just happens to be those needed resources...those wars are over energy needed to keep the system intact. They either need more energy, or to limit complexity (technology would need to be banned, and/or population limited). If they are not willing (or able) to limit complexity, they simply must sonsume more resources for energy. Statism is highly expensive in terms of resource allocation. Don't think the state can save you...it's statelessness that is your savior.  Of 200,000 years of human civilization (roads, law, defense, trade, etc.), only 3% (the past 6,000 years) has been in statism. The other 194,000 years was stateless. The state did not invent property rights, law, defense, roads, or trade. It did not cause the greatest innovations and advances in our time...it in fact hindered them until it decided to fund them personally in order to cure the disease it created. The state is a failed system, and its time to end this blight on human civilization in favor of voluntary government (panarchy). Only then will you keep suicide rates low, murder rates low, and sociopaths from running societies built on coercive hierarchies they rise to the top of so easily.  Illegitimate (compulsory) authority on INNOCENT people causes anomie and its symptoms; rampant murder and suicide. Whether that compulsory authority is a large state or a lack of any norms that leads to the coercions of dog-eat-dog, there is no liberty or autonomy in anomie.
By Megan  Gannon, LiveScienceSuicide has surpassed car  accidents as the No. 1 cause of injury-related death in the United States,  according to new research. From 2000 to 2009, the death rate for suicide  ticked up 15 percent while it decreased 25 percent for car wrecks, th …