At least 50,000 people will be hospitalized this year after trying to kill themselves, according to what the doctors described as conservative estimates. We have many, many suicides and many, many cases where people just disappear. Dr. Haruyoshi Yamamoto has been practicing psychiatry for 26 years and says he's never seen so many people depressed and suicidal. He said he was seeing a spectrum of physical and psychological reactions to the hard economic times, from headaches to chest pains to an inability of some people to focus or even go to work on time. The biggest difficulty that Mr. Obuchi and the other leaders of the country face is fear.
People fear that the hard times are just beginning.
It is the information society. It is the erosion of national sovereignty. It is footloose corporations taking investments where labor is most productive. Argentina was supposed to have it all right. During the 1990s it adopted the IMF program.