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.

The wealth-manager has all of his three companies under investigation for multi-million pound fraud, and he was going through a messy divorce. If you’re thinking of faking you’re own suicide, you could perhaps pay closer attention to the in-flight showing of MacGyver; though a friend who was sent an email by Schrenker after the crash has claimed that the pilot has Special Ops training and a dual personality. Which is, frankly, a badass combination.

Another pilot offers Thucydides’s advice: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” Said pilot is a bit like those goons who said how brave the 9/11 hijackers were; what’s brave is facing the music rather than going off on some Special Ops jolly while your clients get shafted. Schrenker merely joins French investor Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet who killed himself after losing a billion-dollars to the Madoff scandal, and Adolf Merckle who walked in front of a train after seeing his family company get broken up, in the ranks of rich men who left a legacy of sheer recklessness.

This piece in the FT today is interesting, saying how the case is highly unconventional in the way it’s being run. First there’s how the FBI found out about it and were kicking in Madoff’s door within hours, unlike their usual approach of amassing all the evidence over months or years. Then there’s the fact that the FBI and US Attorney’s office are working on the case, as well as financial services watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission, who in turn are being investigated, rather worryingly by themselves, about how they could have missed the fraud in the first place. While the case has been blown out into the open, there’s now a period of hunkering back down, and trying to find both the defrauded money (recently estimated to still be $830m in liquid assets) and whether anyone else was involved, as well as starting the process of seeing who dropped the ball in the SEC.

So while the Bureau gets its best web-of-lies untanglers to work, let’s have a look at some of the nasty details that have emerged recently. Carl Shapiro, the kindly philanthropic investor who lost big with Madoff gave him $250m just 10 days before Madoff’s confession; so was it an investment, or a loan? And if it was the latter, did Shapiro have an inkling of what was up? I wonder, not that I think the poor guy was any way involved.

Meanwhile, the founder of Bank Medici, Sonja Kohn, has gone into hiding after investing $2.1bn with Madoff; what she’s hiding from are the concrete Manolos she’s being fitted for by the hired goons of Russian oligarchs, who have holdings in the Austrian bank. Eeek! And another sad tale of suicide amid financial collapse came with Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who killed himself just before Christmas after he lost over $1bn of other people’s money by investing with Madoff.

Schaudenfraude fans and anti-Semites can get their fix at the New Yorker, where this article hangs out with the rich Jews of Palm Beach, who are pawning their jewellery after they’ve started to realise their losses – we’re talking $50,000 vintage Cartier, as well as some disgusting-sounding animal shaped pieces that apparently go for tens of thousands. Sounds like the enforced new-puritanism will at least slough off some of bad lapses in taste.

And finally there’s Madoff himself having one last throw of the dice of illegality, by sending $1m-worth of jewels through the mail whilst on bail, in an effort to have something to leave his wife and kids. I’m being really soft, but that make me feel actually sorry for him. Must be that post-Christmas glow still working away.