Suicides are rising in Thailand

Other places in the world are discussing the Covid lockdown and the impact it is having on the population. All of this is very intriguing to anyone that has any level of compassion I think. In a country such as Thailand, where people are not going to get $1200 in the mail to stay at home things are a bit more dire though..

Thailand has experienced a very low number of deaths from Corona Virus, and their lockdown follow-up by the government was pretty harsh when they shut all borders, closed most industries, and limited medical access to certain things the same as most countries in the world did. Some people could argue that Thailand simply modeled their anti-Covid strategy after what the United States did.

On the flip side, there are now 38 suicide attempts and 28 successful suicide attempts that can be directly attributed to the economic issues that have come from the measures the government has taken to combat Covid-19.

With the shutdown the government lockdown Thailand has put an estimated 20 million people (out of 76 million population) into unemployment. Despite a noteworthy attempt on the part of the government to look after the people during this time of non-work, Thailand faces a situation where a great many of its population are employed "off the books" and are therefore not eligible for government assistance once it is offered.

Some of these people have opted to kill themselves once the money problems kicked in.

When the country was shut down, the government offered to pay a monthly stipend of 5,000 Baht ( around $160) to those who applied for the aid. 27 million people applied for the aid. There was only enough money in the fund to supply 4 million of them with the promised money. A lot of the money disappeared in the middle in what is a well-known corruption scheme that exists in Thai government.

While much of the world including and especially my country argues about this political party's and that party's reasoning for opening the country or keeping it shut, countries like Thailand have people that are taking their own lives because they do not have money to eat and have no family to help them in these horrible times.

Unfortunately, I think there is a good chance that Thailand is only shut down because they "followed the leader" by closing down in a similar fashion to the USA an EU.