Dimitris Christoulas is not the first or last Greek to take his own life as the financial crisis takes hold in Greece

Dimitris Christoulas, the 77-year-old retired pharmacist who shot himself on Syntagma Square in Athens because, as he said in the note he left behind, he would rather die than scavenge in rubbish bins for his food, is not the first and will most certainly not be the last Greek to take his own life during this crisis.

One of the many subjects people in Greece suggested I write about during a recent week-long reporting trip was the inexorable rise in the suicide rate, which used to be Europe's lowest but has, over the past three years of economic misery, officially doubled.

"Many suicide notes have been left, and they mostly have to do with the crisis," strathallen, a frequent Cif commenter from Patras in the southwest, said. "Some instances are quite horrific: an 80-odd year-old woman who committed suicide by setting herself on fire, because she no longer wanted to be an economic burden on her children."

But will Christoulas, an instant symbol of the loss of even relative prosperity and dignity under such savage austerity, become for Greece what Mohammed Bouazizi became for Tunisia? Bouazizi was, lest anyone had forgotten, the distraught fruit and veg vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010, sparking the Tunisian revolution and, ultimately, the wider Arab Spring.

Certainly, many Greeks are in desperate straits. In its fifth straight year of recession, Greece has seen its GDP shrink by a crushing 17%. Unemployment currently stands at 21%. Wages have fallen by a third since 2009 and are set to slide a further 15% in the next three years. Pensions, as Christoulas dramatically demonstrated, have been slashed.

The austerity measures imposed by the IMF and EU as a condition of Greece's successive bailouts have seen one in 11 people in greater Athens reduced to using soup kitchens daily, stocks of half the country's most prescribed medicines running out.

On my trip I met a secondary school teacher whose pay, which stood at €1,200 a month in 2010 and was cut to €850 last year, is set to fall to €600 from next month (his rent and bills remain €400), and a child psychologist who has not been paid at all since December; she and her two small sons have had to move in with her mother.

But I also met any number of people doing things differently in the face of a state no longer capable, plainly, of doing anything much for them: food distribution programmes; volunteer tutors and medics; communities exchanging and bartering goods and services without recourse to the euro at all. I visited a theatre selling tickets for food; and saw in action a direct, producer-to-consumer movement that has cut the price of some staple foodstuffs by two-thirds.

So tragic as it is, I'm not sure whether Christoulas's death will spark a revolution (although it will certainly spark more violence – it already has – in Syntagma Square.) Partly, it is that fewer Greeks seem to have the stomach for further mass confrontation, which the authorities will in any case no longer permit.

Partly, too, it is that any Greek uprising would, in effect, have to take on not only corruption and inefficiency in Athens but also the combined weight of the EU, IMF and the international financial community too. And partly it is that, in the words of one woman I spoke to, some Greeks at least have now "moved beyond anger" into organisation. Although there is, of course, a limit to what people can do. They cannot, for example, as the child psychologist Korina Hatzinikolaou pointed out to me, run a health service.