High-profile credit crunch suicides are tip of iceberg

Leaving an apologetic note for his family but attempting no clear explanation, Adolf Merckle, a quiet German industrialist with a fortune once estimated at around €7bn, took a bitterly cold 300m walk from his home in southwest Germany to a nearby railway line on Monday and threw himself under a passing train.

His family say the 74-year-old felt "powerless to act" as he watched his empire of 120 companies stuttering and failing in the worldwide financial crisis.

To date, Merckle is the richest man known to have committed suicide in the face of huge economic losses. It is estimated, for example, that he lost as much as €500m in the VW short selling scandal in autumn 2008. But there are plenty of similar cases.

Google shows a large increase in searches for ‘how to commit suicide’

In September a "tense" Kirk Stephenson, COO of the Olivant private equity firm and owner of multi-million-pound homes in Chelsea and the country, threw himself in front of an express train in Berkshire. He left behind him a wife and eight-year-old son.

In November a 36-year-old Brazilian trader, Paulo Silva, stepped onto the floor of the stock exchange in Sao Paulo and shot himself in the chest. Electronic trading continued around the critically injured broker who was later saved by paramedics.

In a more disturbing case in Los Angeles in October, Karthik Rajaram, an out-of-work financial manager, murdered his wife, three sons and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself.

Rajaram's death prompted fears that with the unofficial death toll of the financial crisis rising around the world, and particularly in America where home repossessions have left many families without homes and jobs, the US government would be faced with a situation similar to the 12 months following the Wall Street crash of 1929 when 23,000 Americans took their own lives – a record for any 12-month period.

In the Northern Hemisphere particularly, medical services are anxious that the combination of a cold winter and a spluttering economy will become a lethal provocation.

The director general of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan, has warned: "It should not come as a surprise if we continue to see more stresses, more suicides and more mental disorders."

As graphs showing the value of shares move one way, graphs showing the number of Google searches for suicide-related phrases move the other.

Google Trends shows a significant increase in the amount of searches for 'how to commit suicide' and a frightening crescendo for 'suicide methods' since the middle of 2008. Both search terms are still getting more popular.

High-profile real estate executive Steven Good probably didn't do much research before he drove his Jaguar to a remote corner of a forest near Chicago to shoot himself dead last week.

Equally, it was probably not a Google search that made Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a 65-year-old French businessman based in New York, slash his wrists and take an overdose of pills two days before Christmas.

Rather, it was the knowledge that he had lost $1.4bn invested with the infamous Bernard Madoff. "He was totally ruined," said his brother Bertrand.