Follow-up question in regards to the chart:
Why were suicide-rates so high in Switzerland from the mid 70's to the early 90's (even surpassing Japan)?
Judging by the amount of removed comments, this is a very controversial issue.
The idea of a high suicide rate was used in a speech by U.S. President Eisenhower in July 1960. He said:
"Only in the last few weeks, I have been reading quite an article on the experiment of almost complete paternalism in a friendly European country. This country has a tremendous record for socialistic operation, following a socialistic philosophy, and the record shows that their rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably and I think they were almost the lowest nation in the world for that. Now, they have more than twice our rate. Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all sides. Therefore, with that kind of example, let's always remember Lincoln's admonition. Let's do in the federal Government only those things that people themselves cannot do at all, or cannot so well do in their individual capacities."
Sweden isn't mentioned, but it would have been clear to anyone which country he was talking about Some. Some claim that the article was from Reader's Digest, but I can't find a source for that. The article might have been from a letter by George Orwell from 1949, in which he wrote:
"I always thought Sweden sounded a dull country [...] But I have never been able to like these model countries with everything up to date and hygienic and an enormous suicide rate." (Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol 4 (paperback edition 1971), p 541).
Eisenhower apologized for his statement during a visit to Sweden in 1962.
It should not come as a surprise that a conservative American president would make note of flaws in Sweden in the 1960's. Sweden was viewed as a socialist country, but had the 5th largest GDP per capita in the world in 1960, so something must be off, right?
Maybe not. The graph in the question shows only a few countries, and does not give enough data to claim that Sweden had unusually high suicide rates compared to other countries.
It should also be noted that the graph shows reported suicides and not actual suicides. Suicide carries a social stigma, and did so even more historically. This stigma has been stronger in strongly catholic countries and conservative countries. Because of this, there has been pressure on doctors to specify the cause of death as unknown rather than as suicide, both from families of the deceased and from the government (this can be compared to how early victims of AIDS were claimed to have died of cancer in obituaries). There simply is no reliable data on historical suicide rates, or even current rates. The figures should not be interpreted as exact, but rather as a minimum.
Sweden in the 1960's was a socially progressive country, so the social stigma might have been smaller there. The idea of social engineering was also popular and any engineer needs good data to work with, so better reporting of causes of death was most likely encouraged.
TL;DR: No one knows if the suicide rates really were higher in Sweden than in other countries, but the idea that they were has become popular due to political reasons.
Sources: Are Swedes more suicidal than most? http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?artikel=5924063
Svenska självmord, http://www.faktoider.nu/swedicides.html
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?year_low_desc=true
Follow-up question: does it have anything to do with the economic shift away from free markets, large increases in tax rates, and growing migration from the Balkans and Turkey? How much of the suicide rate was new citizens vs several generations down of Swedes?
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I'm not qualified to answer, and I know it's not the same country, but I remember learning about Switzerland's Verdingkinder who grew up to be depressed and angry. I'd never heard of the practice until recently and I wonder how widespread it was in Europe.
