Emigration and Suicide: What You Need to Know to Prevent New Tragedies

Evgeny Safronov moved to France about six months ago. According to colleagues, the 38-year-old freelance journalist struggled with emigration, the loss of his familiar professional environment, and suffered from loneliness and depression. A few days before his death, he reported that his digital accounts had been hacked, which apparently increased his anxiety and sense of insecurity. The French police are treating the incident as a suicide; the investigation is ongoing.

The story of Evgeny Safronov’s death is, unfortunately, not an isolated case. It painfully highlights an issue that is still rarely discussed openly in the emigrant community: the high suicide risk faced by people forced into often prolonged emigration.

Vulnerability Far from Home

Psychologists at Reforum Help regularly work with clients who have suicidal thoughts and intentions. In the three-plus years since the mass departure from Russia, many have passed through the initial adaptation phase and are now at the stage of integration. Here, they face a painful moment: if they fail to settle into their new life, and returning is impossible or unsafe, the feeling of temporariness is replaced by a sense of dead end. Suicidal thoughts cease to be a marginal phenomenon and, unfortunately, become a widespread issue.

Emigration is not just moving to another country. Almost always, it is a state of uncertainty, a layering of losses that compound each other. People lose their usual social circle, sense of home, stable identity, professional fulfillment, and feeling of recognition. Added to this is the inability to return freely, separation from loved ones, exhausting nostalgia, and the realization that the old life is over while the new one has not begun.

This experience rarely creates a problem from scratch, but it sharply exacerbates any vulnerabilities a person already had. Chronic stress, depressive episodes, traumatic experiences, psychological traits, or lack of skills in seeking help can be greatly intensified in emigration. Often, a person is left without support—either because it truly isn’t there, or because they don’t know how or are afraid to ask for it. The pressure builds, and at some point, suicidal thoughts become not so much a desire to die as a way to stop unbearable pain.

It is difficult to precisely measure the scale of the problem. However, communication within emigrant communities, the experience of psychological services, and regular news reports show: among Russian-speaking migrants, suicide risk has already become a critical issue.

At the same time, there is very little work being done to address it; the cultural and political context of this emigration is poorly understood in many countries, and the topic itself remains invisible and often ignored. If the situation does not change, we can expect not a decrease, but a rise in suicide risk.

Psychological services in emigration are increasingly having to work in crisis mode. This is not just about anxiety or sadness, but about suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and direct preparation for suicidal acts, which require special protocols and rapid response.

How Wide Is the Risk Zone

In the early stages of a suicidal crisis, a person often talks about their thoughts. Conversations about death, phrases like “I have nothing to live for,” “I’m tired,” “I see no future”—all these are serious signals (though from the outside they may sometimes seem like “whining” or a cry for attention).

From a professional point of view, this is a cry for help. As long as a person is talking, they still hope to be noticed and heard. In behavior, this may appear as depressive sluggishness, chronic stress with no outlet, loss of the ability to enjoy things, or, on the contrary, sudden mood swings and unnatural excitement.

If a person regularly talks about suicidal thoughts and their condition is worsening, it is important to act. The ideal option is to help them reach out to a specialist: in many countries there are crisis services, including free ones, and such resources are often available in migrant organizations.

But professional help is not the only possible step. It’s important to put your own affairs aside, be there, and listen. Even at the early stages of crisis intervention, professionals often do just that: sit and listen. A close person can do this just as well. The main thing is not to ignore the signals and, if you don’t have enough strength yourself, involve outside help.

If You Catch Yourself Not Wanting to Live

When thoughts of being unneeded and meaningless arise, self-support does not always work. It’s important to try to talk to someone—a friend, relative, or psychologist. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone you don’t know well.

If your condition is not critical but you feel down and empty, gentle activation can help: go outside, walk from point A to point B, visit a familiar place, move around a bit without forcing yourself. And if possible, seek support: it helps not only to get through a difficult moment, but also to gradually change your inner worldview.

What Loved Ones Can Do

After making the decision to end their life, a person’s mood sometimes improves—they feel relieved by the sense of certainty. That’s why the final stage can be impossible to recognize. If a tragedy still occurs, the guilt felt by loved ones is understandable, but it’s important to know that sometimes not even a specialist can help.

But at the early stages, loved ones can really do a lot: remind the person of their worth, talk about their achievements, offer support, stay in touch, invite them for a walk. It is absolutely not worth belittling their feelings, pressuring them, or demanding they “pull themselves together.” It’s much more important to help them see an alternative future, find support in the present, and withstand difficult conversations if you have the strength. What matters is not words, but the chance for the person to voice their pain and be heard. Enduring this conversation—not interrupting, not changing the subject, not trying to “fix” everything immediately—is already a form of help. And if you don’t have the resources, that’s okay too: then it’s important to involve someone who does.

When the Situation Becomes an Emergency

If a person puts their affairs in order, gives away things, looks for medications, writes farewell letters, this is an emergency. In such cases, even professionals call an ambulance and seek hospitalization. It’s better for help to arrive “for nothing” than not to arrive at all. After a crisis, support, monitoring of the condition, and ongoing psychotherapy are especially important, since repeat attempts, unfortunately, are possible.

Suicide risk in emigration is a psychological response to prolonged uncertainty, loss, and systemic pressure.

Egor Burtsev, coordinator of the Reforum Help psychological service, and his colleagues work with this reality every day. “Migrants are a vulnerable group. We live without support, in a state of uncertainty and social marginalization. All this creates intense, multi-layered stress. Many are tied to jobs they can’t leave, dependent relationships, and the impossibility of returning to a country where their home, work, or family remain. This pressure sometimes leads to critical states, including suicidal thoughts,” says Burtsev. “Most often, in consultations, we encounter anxiety, depression, relationship crises, loss of meaning and life direction. Our clients’ sense of guilt is overshadowed by a feeling of being lost and unneeded—neither in the host country nor in their homeland—and stricter migration rules and being unable to see loved ones create deep inner frustration. We see all kinds of people—strong, famous, charismatic individuals who used to cope on their own but at some point could no longer do so. There are former political prisoners, people with PTSD and complex trauma, and those with worsening mental disorders.”

The head of Reforum Help adds that, together with his colleagues, he regularly studies the psychological state of their clients, tracks levels of anxiety, depression, and attitudes toward the future: “We also look at post-traumatic growth—the ability to process traumatic experiences and find ways to move forward.”

In the near future, Reforum Help will launch a new wave of research on the psychological state of migrants (here are the results of the previous survey). The results will help the psychological service adjust the volume and formats of support. We would be grateful for the participation of ‘Most’ readers.