The economy is not a mob of zombies that is actually going about eating peoples brains, but the downturn has been associated with some very high profile suicides. They may not be a synchronized diving of suited businessmen from skyscraper windows, but there have been a series of deaths likely related to the economy. 

On these pages we’ve seen Patrick Rocca, who put a gun to his head in his home after losing nearly £500m; German industrialist Adolf Merckle who threw himself under a train after a short position on VW ended badly; and French financier Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet who stabbed himself after losing big with Madoff. Add to them Chicago real estate mogul Steven Good and London-based financier Kirk Stephenson and you’ve got yourself a certified cultural meme. 

Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist, says: “The identity of these people is so tied into their career that when it’s gone they don’t know who they are any more. These are high achievers, high earners, ‘Alpha Male’ types who have a good education, a good career, a high standard of living and suddenly it disappears on them and they have to re-evaluate everything.”

So if you’re used to the good life, it can be impossible to leave behind. Princess Luciana Pignatelli washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with gin at the age of seventy because she had lost what she believed to be most important: her money and looks. The author of The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book told friends “I can’t face being old and poor”, after learning all of her investments were worthless.

Unfortunately the money troubles faced by the incredibly rich can end up trickling down and affecting the more average person. Last month Major William Foxton, 65, scribbled a suicide note, marched to a park bench near his home and put a pistol to his head after he lost up to £1million to the Madoff fraud. ”People think econocide is a problem on Wall Street but it is also affecting people on Main Street, ordinary families who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings,” says Dr Leslie Seppinni.

Dr Alan Berman of the American Association of Suicidology warns of the dire econocide-filled future we may face: “If the current recession lasts as long as the experts are predicting we expect we will see something parallel to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, suicide rose by more than 50%, to 17.5 per 100,000 of the population.”

On a side note, the 1930s had its own suicide anthem in the form of “Gloomy Sunday”, said to be responsible for hundreds of deaths. But the noughties has gone one better, and we’ve got an actual band called Econocide, playing bedroom grindcore so awful that ending it all seems like the only method of truly cleansing your ears of the sonic memory.

All of this doom, gloom and econocide talk is absolutely depressing and inflated when lumped together like this, but at the moment these cases are rare. While the billionaires’ shame at not being able to provide for their employees can easily be replicated in an average family situation, let’s hope ordinary people maintain perspective. Just don’t listen to Econocide and you should be fine.

Of course this pales next to the dad of Ponzi schemes, Bernard Madoff, but it’s still a good effort from the 76-year-old. He gets bonus points for generating an old-fashioned FBI chase, after he left a suicide note, but didn’t kill himself and instead set off for the airport. Foolishly he used his mobile before he left, and left his car at the airport too. Schoolboy stuff really, I give him five more days.

There’s so much shame, deception and general epic failing going on these days that this blog just writes itself. Who else have we got this week? There’s Rod Cameron Stringer, another hedge-fund fraudster nailed by the SEC this week. He wasn’t approved by them, didn’t have a licence, is a used-car salesman, and claimed he provided returns of 61%, so if you invested with him you frankly deserve to get scammed. Oh, but wait, his investors were “mainly elderly”. Stringer exploited the trust of old people to build “a pool for his office”. They’re renovating an entire wing of the sixth layer of hell just for Stringer as we speak.

Also this week there’s Patrick Rocca, who unlike Nadel actually did kill himself, adding to Merckle and Villehuchet’s post-crisis suicide meme. Rocca is an Irish property investor and developer, who owns buildings occupied by the likes of Argos and Norwich Union. He’s believed to have lost big with Anglo-Irish Bank getting nationalised last week. But he had a Jet Ranger helicopter to run away with! Arthur Nadel could have bought a good few months fugitive status with that thing.

And in Madoff updates, we’ve got a British Virgin Islands hedge fund saying they’ve lost $350m with Madoff (sorry, but tax exiles get zero sympathy chez Bad Idea), and there’s also his business associate Robert Jaffe, who yesterday refused to answer the subpoena issued to him to outline his involvement with Madoff. He received one or two percent on transactions he fed to Madoff, but for his part he claims that he didn’t know anything about Madoff’s shadiness, and his family, including Carl Shapiro, have been some of the biggest losers. Jaffe has already had to face some wrath, when he went to a party full of people who lost money with Madoff, and got involved in some “pushing and shoving”. 

Finally Marc Dreier, the lawyer who allegedly ran a fraudulent investment scheme worth $380m, finds out whether he gets bail today. Yesterday prosecutors recommended he not be allowed bail, as he posed a high risk of fleeing Nadel-style. But in the face of seized assets, major criminal charges, and a mental-sounding son who destroyed dad’s mobile phones after the charges were made, their lawyer is confident: “I’m still confident of our position. I believe we have the better part of the argument”. Good luck with that one!