I am not sure that this infographic is accurate as I have not done any of the research myself, bit it correlates, in broad terms, with my personal experience of the countries I have lived in or visited overt the last 20 years or so in Europe.
Male Suicide Rates
Female Suicide Rates
You will note that Italy has in both cases a much lower figure than most of the rest of Europe, and certainly less than the Northern Europeans.
This is despite the fact that the Italian economy is quite terrible when compared to say the one of the UK. Or perhaps I should rephrase. A middle management position in UK is likely to command two to three times the salary of an equivalent position in Italy, and sometimes more than that. So what I mean is that the wealthy are wealthy everywhere, but the middle to small guys are crushed and working harder for less than in the North.
And yet… the South are less suicidal.
A lot of British people I know blame it on the weather. I mean, can you see it?
“DAMNIT! It’s drizzling again, that’s it!” Proceeds to suicide himself by hanging himself from a doorknob while practicing autoerotic asphyxiation for the last time.
Yeah, it never seemed realistic to me either. But Italy does have a lot more joie de vivre, despite all the massive problems it has. The reason for that is that at every level in Italy, the culture of faceless and nameless drone has not yet permeated. So, while you can and often do, get the lazy bureaucrat or official somehow blocking your path, he also gets many Italians daily calling him a lazy asshole or a variation thereof. In short, despite the near total collapse of society, when I compare it to the mod 1970s, the fact remains that culturally the Italians still think of themselves (and others) as individuals, not cogs in a machine.
I attribute that to the cultural norm here being the shadow of Catholicism, which considers the human being as valuable and unique, as opposed to that of Protestantism, which tends to mechanise the individual for the supposed benefit of ”society”, and atomise the family, with rigid impositions of roles somewhat arbitrarily, or, paradoxically, the almost absolute absence of them, and this, on ideological grounds, not practical experience and considerations.
The dynamics of female-male relations at all levels are also considerably different in Protestant lands when compared to Catholic ones, and experience tends to suggest that the females of the species, do tend to prefer the Southern experience to the Northern one; no matter how strenuously they might deny it before losing their clothing.
They are just observations I have noted long ago and nothing has really changed my mind after a couple of decades in each (relative) Northern and Southern countries.
Makes me wonder if easy access to the Med coast, sunshine, beaches, swimming, girls in bikinis, etc, is helping the Southrons. Breaking down the French stats by region could be a good test for my hypothesis.
Very few pleasures in life can measure up to a good day at the beach.