“Ten Friends, Eleven Problems”

“Every day we wake up feeling anxious, like we’re being terrorized psychologically.” That’s how Yanna, a part-time municipal employee in the Greek town of Elefsina, describes how she and her husband Antonios feel when the morning alarm rings these days.

“Our leaders give us no light at the end of the tunnel. They give us no hope,” she says.

Before I left for Athens, I had been reading reports about the rise in suicides since the onset of the country’s dire financial crisis. The BBC’s Chloe Hadjimatheou did a great piece on this. It featured Klimaka (pictured), a suicide helpline for Greeks. I had also heard an interview with Apostolos Polyzonis, an unemployed Greek man who recently stood in front of his bank, and set himself on fire.

But after a week of interviews in Greece, the issue of psychological health seemed much more real and concrete.

Person after person that I spoke with echoed Yanna. They talked about how the austerity measures (reduced wages and layoffs combined with higher taxes) were taking a severe toll. As Yanna herself put it: “We wake up every morning looking at our bills, wondering how we’re going to pay them.”

She tells me that they haven’t purchased new clothes or new shoes for more than a year. They don’t go out anymore, and they’ve shaved down their supermarket bills.They’ve also just been kicked out of their apartment.

Antonios, Yanna’s husband, works in sales. He has to drive to do his business, but he told me that the rise in gas prices is taking a toll.

“I’ll spend on more on gas trying to find a sale than I’ll make on the actual sale,” Antonios said. He has seven brothers, and he’s currently the only one employed.

“There’s a saying in Greece,” Antonios told me. “If you have ten friends, there will be eleven problems.”

In other words, the social nets that people used to depend on – family, and friends – are not there anymore because everyone is suffering.

“It gets so you don’t even leave the house anymore,” Antonios said, “because you’re worried you might spend money.”

“They’ve taken us out of the normal rhythm of life,” is how pensioner Petros Lazarou described it to me. “It’s affecting our health, my health,” he said.

Lazarou, who smoked throughout our entire interview, told me that he’s already had double-bypass heart surgery, and that he is determined not to let the austerity measures ruin the rest of his life.

But Lazarou isn’t just anxious, he’s also angry, especially at the Greek political leadership.

“They succeeded in making a mockery of Greece in the whole world,” Lazarou said. “They also succeeded in making a mockery of the citizens of this country, saying that we were eating and consuming borrowed money from Europe. That’s a big lie, the Greeks are good people, and they work hard.”

The Greek man who set himself on fire in front of a bank, Apostolos Polyzonis, survived. In an interview with the BBC, he described a horrific scene in which bank employees urged him to go ahead and light himself on fire.

The interviewer asked Polyzonis if he would try to kill himself again.

No, Polyzonis said, but he would now consider setting ATMs on fire.