Suicide rates in a number of EU countries increased following the 2008 recession and the EU financial crisis of 2009, mainly among men, and were associated in part with rising unemployment levels - but this trend did not persist in most countries (OECD, 2016). Mortality rates at these “midlife” ages have been increasing since the 1990s, a trend attributed primarily to drug overdoses, alcohol related liver disease, and suicides ("deaths of despair"), and to decelerating improvements in mortality from heart disease and cancer (Woolf et al, 2018, Bernstein and Ingraham, 2017). The death rate from drug overdoses more than tripled between 2000 and 2016, with a sharp rise from 2014 (Hedegaard et al.,