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Suicides and depression cost the Japanese economy almost 32 billion dollars last year on top of their human toll, the government said Tuesday, the first time it released such an estimate, foreign media reported.

Welfare payments and medical costs for the depressed, the lost incomes of those in care and those who killed themselves, and other factors came to 2.68 trillion yen (31.8 billion dollars) last year, the government said.
The figure included an estimate of 1.9 trillion yen worth of income that could have been earned by the 26,500 people aged 15 to 69 who killed themselves in 2009, had they chosen to live and work one more year.

Japan, a country of about 127 million people, has one of the world’s highest suicide rates, with 32,845 people killing themselves last year, the 12th year in a row when the number was over 30,000.