Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director, LiveScience.com

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a

family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of

a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says.

The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell,

however, several studies have found that suicides as well

as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While

family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such

events can be tied to poor economic situations such as

the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist

at University of Buffalo.

"I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few

years because economic strain on families provokes

depression and desperation," Blair said.

Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and

deadly domestic violence.

Suicide risk

Blair cited a 2003 study in the Journal of Epidemiology &

Community Health, which found that "being unemployed

was associated with a twofold to threefold increased

relative risk of death by suicide, compared with being

employed." The study's researchers noted, however, that

about half the association they found "might be

attributable to confounding by mental illness."

A 1998 study in the British Medical Journal found "the link

between suicide and unemployment is more powerful that

other socio-economic measures."

And as we all know, the current economic downturn is

unlike anything seen in decades, with pressures on some

people coming from all angles at once.

"From the individual's point of view, the loss of a job is

certainly bad, but it can become much, much worse when

it coincides with a loss of savings and investments, the

loss of the family home (through foreclosure, for

instance), and dismal prospects for finding another job

soon," Blair said.

In the California case last month, Ervin Lupoe killed his

wife and five children. It was the fifth mass death of a

family by murder or suicide in a year just in Southern

California. Lupoe left a suicide note describing the

"horrendous ordeal" he and his wife went through after

both being fired from their jobs.

(In the Ohio case, Mark Meeks had lost his job but

recently gotten it back, before shooting his wife, his two

small children, and himself. Police are not, however,

leaning toward finance as being the main reason for the

apparent murder-suicide.)

Social isolation

While several studies have linked unemployment to

suicides, it's not clear that overall terrible economic times

cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on

suicides and author of "The Copycat Effect" (Pocket,

2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during

times of social and economic stress: "Historical studies

conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have

discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent

events when there is society-wide anguish, for example,

in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars

and economic depressions."

Suicide is more common than most people think, though.

Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or

roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it

every year, according to researchers at Temple

University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading

cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than

homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women.

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere

economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology

professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much

more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere

in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray

and his colleagues in the November online version of the

journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler's despair,

of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not

the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

"Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing

metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that

may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social

cohesion, all of which have long been identified as

correlates of suicide," Wray said.

Domestic violence linked to suicide

Economic downturns are also known to fuel domestic

violence.

"Economic stresses often lead to more frequent abuse,

more violent abuse, and more dangerous abuse when

domestic violence already exists," wrote Mary R. Lauby,

executive director of Jane Doe Inc., and Sue Else,

president of the National Network to End Domestic

Violence, in a December op-ed piece for The Boston

Globe. "Rhode Island, for example, has recently seen a

25 percent increase in felony-level domestic violence

crimes."

There is also a known link between suicide and domestic

violence.

In a small study of 48 people (nearly all women) killed by

their spouses or former spouses in one Ohio county over

a decade, 41 percent of the perpetrators had previously

threatened to commit suicide.

A 2003 study led by Jacquelyn Campbell at the Johns

Hopkins University School of Nursing found that

unemployment is the single strongest predictor in cases

where men murder their wives. An abuser's lack of a job

increased the risk of femicide fourfold, Campbell's team

reported in the American Journal of Public Health.

All this information could be used to prevent domestic

violence, Campbell argued at the time.

"In the United States, women are killed by intimate

partners more often than by any other type of perpetrator,

 with the majority of these murders involving prior physical

abuse," she said. "Determining key risk factors, over and

above a history of domestic violence, that contribute to

the abuse that escalates to murder will help us identify

and intervene with battered women who are most at risk."

·           Men Suffer Domestic Violence, Too 

·           Humans Crave Violence Just Like Sex 

·           Loneliness Kills, Study Shows 

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