Deaths of despair in the european perspective

Deaths of despair associated with drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide have plagued American society for more than 20 years, and no reliable recipe has yet been found to prevent this negative phenomenon. Researchers from Princeton University Angus Deaton and Anne Case raised the topic in 2015, and since then a number of other experts have been trying to explore the topic from different perspectives and find out what mortality affects the most. So far, not much has been heard about this issue in European realities. The aim of this work was therefore to evaluate the state of the last few years and to find out what socio-economic factors may stand in the background of this phenomenon. Looking at the time series, it was found that the development of this specific mortality in most European countries is steadily declining and follows the overall mortality curve, which since the second half of the last century corresponds to the theory of epidemiological transition in most developed world. In the next part of the work, it was found at the level of NUTS2 regions that of all available socio-economic indicators that were available and relevant for this work, education and unemployment are particularly important. The surprising finding was that unemployment is in a negative state with mortality from despair, although the original assumption was the opposite. With the growth of university graduates, on the other hand, cause-specific mortality is declining. Multiple regression was used to analyze these relationships along with a more advanced stepwise model. At the end of the analytical part, using the method of the main components, it was possible to find certain links between socio-economic characteristics and thus reduce the excessive dimensionality of the data. In the end, some ideas and considerations beyond the literature are given.