Context: this is "surprising" (edit: mods changed title from "Surprisingly, suicide has become rarer during the pandemic") because suicidal ideation (and by some reports, attempts) were dramatically increased during our response to the pandemic. Deaths from alcohol and drug abuse are also up:
On a more anecdotal note, I'm personally close to a therapist, and they're busier with SI patients than ever. They're also overwhelmed with demand, in general, having seen a significant increase in both patients and patients with SI over the course of 2020.
To add to the anecdata, I have friends who are therapists as well, and they're approaching burnout. The lockdowns and media hysteria are making latent, managable issues unmanageable. I would wonder if the lack of privacy for many people in vulnerable state is what keeps them from acting.
Given the viral property of suicides[1] in communities, a sudden mean reversion on those stats concievably risks turning into a cascade effect as well, which would manifest just on our way out of this mess.
Based on my looking at disposable cash flows available to the average American, I am curious if the pandemic assistance is perhaps allowing people to treat latent issues that they wouldn't have before - due to higher opportunity cost of consumption and also less cash flow.
My gut assumption would be that seeing a therapist virtually is now normalised due to COVID.
Prior to 2020, my insurer would've laughed me off if I tried to claim a psychotherapy visit that wasn't done in person. Now it seems they're bending over backwards to let me know they are allowing it.
Something as small as physically going to an appointment is enough of a barrier to access, sometimes.
To add more anecdata, I've heard of an increase in people seeking help for addiction issues (alcohol, weed). I imagine many of them perhaps were problematic in their use already, but the pandemic made things bad enough to seek help.
I also know some therapists, and one surprising thing I learned is that they are very lonely - their jobs are literally to have face-time with customers, so there is zero time left for hanging out with coworkers; something that I have a lot of in the software sector. I guess director level managers may have a similar problem but I am not there yet :)
100% agree with others in this thread that my immediate thought was this headline and subheadline are misleading. It doesn't take a bunch of studies (although there are many and thanks for posting some of them) to know that lockdowns, social isolation, closing of public gathering spots, "death count tickers" on TV, reduced family visits, and when one does get out in the public, constant covering of everyone's facial expressions (no smiles) to know that there's going to be a public health impact. I don't think we'll know the extent of the impact for years.
As others have mentioned, this pandemic isn't actually over yet and even when it is there could be lagging effects.
Similar to celebrating how the economy is doing better than ever during covid, but the actual bill for unprecedented government spending hasn't come due.
> constant covering of everyone's facial expressions (no smiles)
I have noticed little sympathy for this here on HN, as well as in interviews with scientific advisors to my own government (who tell the journalist things like "masks are just a thin little layer of fabric, they have no drawbacks whatsoever!"). Often people point to Asia as a reason people should not feel any unease in a mask, but the smile famously plays a rather different role in Asian body language than in the West.
I actually think that covering faces reduces stress. People ate able to have their boundaries and not feek pressured to smile for strangers when they don't want to.
In 2021, a person having a bad mental health day can wrap their face up and not have to deal with anyone. Possibly taking a lot of pressure out of a critical tipping point of mental distress.
At least in normal people, the act of smiling releases some chemicals to make you feel better. Smiling at strangers therefore only feels oppressive to those who already have an underlying issue such as depression. I would therefore not say this is the general case: that it reduces stress.
> Fascinating seeing how so many people do not want to accept the data as is because it doesn't fit their pre-conceptions.
Not sure exactly what you're implying here, but cherry-picking data to fit pre-conceptions has definitely been an epidemic of its own throughout the Covid situation.
Pretty much every discussion of covid had multiple people claiming that suicides went up so much, that they probably turned lockdowns, masking etc contraproductive. Cause they supposedly drove more people to suicide then saved.
The suicides went down thing really goes against what significant part if HN wants to believe.
It's valuing the hard statistics in the article over people asking other people how they are feeling, not cherrypicking. Trying to convince people that suicidal ideation and attempts are up without a corresponding increase in suicides is going to be a hard sell.
It's important to realise there's a lag with suicide statistics, and most of the research is looking at early days, and all of the researchers are saying that distress is up and we need to guard against a rise in future.
Here's Prof Louis Appleby, clinical lead for suicide prevention in England.
> A year into the pandemic, what is the evidence? The short answer is that there has been little effect. But it’s more complex than that, as it always is with suicide statistics.
> First though, it’s important to stress that the graphs and figures that are used to answer this question are not dry data. They represent real lives lost, real families devastated. No suicide rate, whether high or low, rising or falling, is acceptable. Even before covid-19, there were over 6000 deaths by suicide per year in the UK, an estimated 800,000 worldwide.
[...]
> Our conclusions at this stage, however, should be cautious. These are early findings and may change. Beneath the overall numbers there may be variations between demographic groups or geographical areas. After all, the impact of covid-19 itself has not been uniform across communities.
Yes. The Economist is cherry picking data from one place, in one narrow period of time. All of the other studies (that you keep ignoring) cover much larger samples of people, over longer periods of time.
Also, "number of successful suicides" is an extreme, myopic metric for mental health. Ignoring all of the upstream signs of decreased mental well-being, and focusing only on successful suicides, is like measuring societal well-being exclusively by homicide rate.
"Sure, people are depressed, anxious, isolated and panicked, have increased suicidal ideation, and are seeking therapy in greater numbers than ever before...but they're not successfully killing themselves! All is well!"
If the data doesn't fit the preconceptions, then it's either something wrong with the data or with the preconceptions.
At this point doubt is healthy, especially since similar data from different sources shows different results.
I would really like to see an attempt to critically examine all the available data and try to give a plausible scientifical explanation, leaving aside political prejudices and sides.
What impacts what you consider "plausible" is your political preference.
Can I see the source of data indicating that there has been an increase in suicide deaths in the US? So far, nobody in the thread has actually posted such "similar data."
Nebulous references to what is "plausible" and "similar data" that never appears is, of course, exactly what we don't want.
It doesn't take a genius to look at the immense, obvious damage to our mental health from excessive isolation to think perhaps there's something wrong with the way we are measuring this.
No, appealing to some billionaire's retold saying is not going to make me prioritize anecdote over data. I am not denying a mental health crisis, merely saying that it appears that suicides have declined. I understand that is counterintuitive.
Is this the level of sloppy reasoning we have fallen to?
I honestly don't understand why this headline is at all counterintuitive.
People are currently unhappy because of the pandemic, and people can point at that and understand that there's an exogenous cause right in all of our faces causing the problem and everyone is affected.
People are much more likely to commit suicide when they just believe that everyone else is doing fine and they're the only ones whose lives are shit.
It’s not sloppy reasoning. We should update our beliefs in light of new evidence in proportion to the strength of the evidence and the strength of our prior belief. How much would an equivalent study on the existence of ESP move your belief on that subject? A good answer would be not much if at all because a priori we expect the study being wrong is far more likely than the existence of ESP. For me, it would take more than an observational study to update my belief at all. This is prioritizing anecdotes over data - moreover, my belief (ESP doesn’t exist) wasn’t scientific in the first place!
Epistemology is impossibly hard. Determining the strength of evidence is hard. In the places that a paper contradicts our mental model of the world, the only sane approach is to question the paper.
Little of what you've said is at odds with what I'm saying, it just is dressed up in the pop-Bayesian signifiers that seem to be popular right now.
To put it in that context, what I am contending is that people seem to have unreasonably high priors about the impact of this pandemic on suicides that don't seem to be based on much at all, and I believe underestimate the fundamental complexity of the world, that cause and effect are often difficult to trace.
The fact that you are comparing the idea that suicides have decreased during the pandemic with the existence of ESP is, I think, emblematic of exactly this sort of false overconfidence.
Anecdotes should have some, but marginal, impact on our posterior when coming head to head with data.
> Epistemology is impossibly hard. Determining the strength of evidence is hard. In the places that a paper contradicts our mental model of the world, the only sane approach is to question the paper.
References to the sanity of one approach over the other aside, I do not see how this follows from what you said before. I agree that determining the strength of evidence is hard. I would suggest that creating a causal model of the world from anecdata might be a bit harder.
e: As a sort of meta-point, I really do find it interesting the increasing currency of Bayesian concepts in pop imagination, often combined with arguments against good inference. It seems almost like pop-Bayesianism is the sophistry of the 21st century, both in the sort of argumentation that characterizes it and as a sociological phenomenon, who it appeals to.
If you don't deny a mental health crisis, then it's not sloppy reasoning to increase, in relative terms, your skepticism of studies which show a decrease in a logical consequence of a mental health crisis. This doesn't mean you reject the study. But counterintuitivity surfacing from contrary evidence in the form of both anecdotes and other data is a good as reason as any to be skeptical.
I will be very frank here: it was much much less isolating then period I spent at home when kids were small. And that for me puts these complains into perspective.
Which is why a lot of people don't take these complains so seriously. Because of was much less isolating, everyone was going through the same thing, you was still member of same team.
Or, maybe your preconception doesn't fit the facts? Suicidal ideation is up, which seems very likely to increase the number of suicides. How would you explain that?
I don't have a particularly strong preconception. It seems plausible to me that suicides would increase, but the world is a complex place and I can think of a number of factors that would have led to a decline. In general, economic declines are usually associated with decreased mortality.
It's an interesting question and something to explore. I don't think the relationship between suicidal ideation and successful suicides is strictly linear, there are a lot of variables on the path from one to the other.
That said, I think the evidence is relatively strong for a decline in successful suicide, for whatever reason. Multiple comparative studies have shown this effect.
I'm curious - have you seen a nation-wide comparative/longitudinal study of suicidal ideation? All I can find are news reports about a specific hospital or two.
Unfortunately, no. There seems to be a lack of general population-based longitudinal studies on suicide and suicidal ideation. Most studies take place in the US or Europe, and almost all seem to be focused on particular subgroups like teenagers and young adults; combat veterans; or homeless people. This makes some sense, because one would expect people in these groups to have a higher risk of suicide than the general population. And, indeed, it is true, at least for teenagers and combat veterans; I'm not sure about homeless people.
Maybe someone more familiar with this area knows of something, but I haven't seen it.
I would say that this is "surprising" because the AMA (and many other mental health groups) were predicting a huge increase in suicides, which never happened. Later on, the "people are killing themselves" narrative became the accepted dogma, sans evidence. I don't remember much talk about suicidal ideation, it was mainly (understandably) fixated on the suicide rate.
An increase in actual suicide attempts is different from an increase in self-reported suicide attempts, and I'm not sure how you would reconcile the former with a decrease/stagnation in the suicide rate. If more people are deciding to reach out/ask for help I would expect a similar pattern.
> According to the report, about 30 fewer veterans died by suicide in the five months after the start of the pandemic, compared with the same time frame before the outbreak.
> Known suicide attempts dropped sharply. They had fluctuated between 300 and nearly 600 each week before the pandemic, but numbered between 230 and 340 each week after.
> On-campus suicide attempts also dropped sharply in the early weeks of the pandemic, but they rose in July. However, the number was still small, with 24 attempts that month.
Are "on-campus" attempts tracked by any other organization?
Also,
> VA officials cautioned, however, that it is too early to tell how the closure of VA clinics and hospitals, as well as restrictions on medical services during the pandemic, play into the findings.
That's fine, but seems to be making the same error as the article: numbers from the very beginning of the pandemic are perhaps not representative of the whole story. Particularly so when the numbers are taken from specific sub-populations.
It doesn't say until a few paragraphs in that the study only covers the early months of the pandemic, and it's pretty misleading to focus only on succesful suicide attempts to try and paint things as not that bad. Overdoses, suicide attempts, and child abuse were significantly higher in 2020.
> and child abuse were significantly higher in 2020
Speaking as someone who heard testimonials of what it's like to WFH with kids, this part doesn't surprise me as much.
On a more serious note, I wonder what the mix was of existing abusers just having more contact with the child vs additional stressors causing the abuse (& whether there was abuse that started as a result of the stress).
How should I view a falling rate of suicide but rising rate of suicide attempts?
I am not sure that it is misleading, but agree it isn't the full picture. Naturally, I think the primary focus should be on decreasing successful suicide attempts, then on decreasing suicide attempts writ large.
Personally, I would lump suicide attempts and succesful suicides together in cases like this. I don't think it matters whether or not they succeed, just the fact that things are bad enough that they're suicidal means the pandemic was handled poorly. I don't know if the data is available, but increased attempts with a decrease in successes could be because people were stuck at home where someone could find them before it was too late.
>> Personally, I would lump suicide attempts and succesful suicides together in cases like this.
I wouldn't, those are vastly different outcomes. I would like a separate stat that lumps suicides and overdoses (and maybe deaths from alcoholism) together. They are all sort of death from despair, and it's hard to say weather an O.D. was deliberate or not.
They're vastly different outcomes, but the article is speculating that giving people stimulus checks is why they didn't kill themselves, while ignoring the increased attempts. From a policy making standpoint, I don't think it should matter if someone cuts their wrists and bleeds to death, or cuts their wrists and is taken to an ER and saved. It seems like it would be more effective to focus on making people not want to kill themselves in the first place than trying to reduce how often they're succesful.
I think it definitely matters whether they succeed or not, not much more to say on that other than I disagree and your approach misses important policy changes that could dramatically reduce suicide by reducing the deadliness of attempts (failed attempts make it less likely you will try again).
I don't think an increase in suicides a priori means the pandemic is handled poorly if it is the best we could do while stopping the 600k virus deaths from becoming 1.2 mill or whatever.
It matters in one obvious substantive way, but there's a valid philosophical question as to whether person A who was depressed enough to attempt and fail at suicide is better or worse off than person B who successfully completed the act.
Person A is very likely still depressed and in mental pain. Person B is not. Now, if person A "recovers" and goes on to experience many good years of life, maybe then they're better off, but right now, they may believe that they are worse off than person B.
I am on my phone so don't have the evidence with me right now, but from what I've read, most suicide decisions are relatively spur of the moment, come during a deep depressive moment, and are not necessarily characteristic of the person's broader life or emotional outlook.
There is certainly a question, I merely find myself falling pretty heavily on one side of that question, and I think that is generally the side that people would fall on if it were put up to a vote. Dying from suicide worse than surviving suicide.
>>How should I view a falling rate of suicide but rising rate of suicide attempts?
Badly. People dying to suicide is not good, but like any cause of death, it's going to happen. I think the bigger picture of overall degradation in mental health is a worse indicator than the deaths of people's quality of life. Personally I think you address the overall underlying issues, which would lead to lower death rates.
If we heard that deaths from car accidents was down but the number of accidents was way up, we'd want to do something to address it because clearly there's a problem.
> If we heard that deaths from car accidents was down but the number of accidents was way up, we'd want to do something to address it because clearly there's a problem.
Yes, but it would be much better than the flip side scenario of way more people dying but fewer accidents, no?
Indeed, I would argue it's better than the same number of people dying as before and the same number of accidents.
If "number of dead people" is the only metric we care about, yes, you're 100% right.
But that's not the only thing that matters. I don't want to keep going down the car rabbit hole, so to bring it back to suicide: increased rates of mental distress (as indicated by higher incidences of suicidal ideation) is very bad. This would likely mean several other things which are damaging to both the individuals and society (loss of income, additional expenses from medical treatment, possible run ins with criminal or psychological incarceration)
As with most things, there's no "magic metric" when it comes to mental health relating to suicide that we could say "if we can get this down to 0 everything is fixed".
I'm glad I don't matter to you as long as I haven't yet killed myself. I'll try to keep that in mind while I'm dying inside and dealing with severe depression.
Clearly, fewer people are succeeding at killing themselves than they were before. Exactly why would be a good research question, but, one could speculate that being at home all the time might have something to do with it. Maybe people are being found before they die at a higher rate than before? Who knows.
Perhaps also an increase in the mix of suicide attempts that are unlikely to be successful, for instance, perhaps more women attempting suicide due to IPV, and generally women who attempt suicide are less likely to die.
It should be noted that the study the article is covering only looked at people in Maryland, so the findings don't necessarily apply to the rest of the country.
I also think it is interesting that the article doesn't mention what the actual suicide rates are/were. Prior to the pandemic white suicide rates were more than twice that of black suicide rates.
This is pretty important. Could easily be a spurious result. If we have 100 cities to cherry pick from, then studies will get published and headlines published about the strange outliers
It's super common for the main problem to be "urban living + poor" in these cases (sometimes, just "poor"). If you target interventions on those criteria, rather than color of skin, you'll do a good job of addressing the issue, because skin color wasn't the (primary) acute cause of the problem.
The part where it's a race issue is farther up the causality chain, where "urban living + poor" becomes correlated with "black" in the first place.
I suspect that the study took place in Maryland is why the effect is so pronounced. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find that their race-demographics are even more skewed in terms of geographic distribution and SES than is typical nationwide.
Isn't suicide anti-correlated with urban living? In California urban counties like San Francisco, Alameda, and Los Angeles are clustered around 7 suicides per 100k, while rural counties like Shasta, Siskiyou, and Lake are 25-30.
The median urban San Francisco resident has a significantly higher income than the median Baltimore, MD resident, so if the socioeconomic link to suicide/attempt rate is strong, I could see this being a factor that would significantly confound the urban/suburban/rural split.
I agree, but I don't see a selection bias in something as large and diverse in all dimensions as Los Angeles County. It's bigger than Honduras.
Anyway I just don't see the data from which the original conclusion is made. According to CDC WISQARS the suicide rate in Baltimore MD was 9 per 100k, whereas in nearby rural Cecil County MD it was 24 per 100k.
More important? I don't know. But there are people who think there are theories about race being somewhat causal. One is the "nobody left to blame" theory which basically says people in the dominant culture who aren't happy don't have an easy group to blame. The theory goes, they recognize they should have the elements of happiness since they aren't being oppressed, which can lead to more hopelessness if they are depressed.
"And Veralyn Williams reports on places where there’s a paucity of suicides: African-American communities. As it happens, blacks are only about half as likely to kill themselves as whites. (When it comes to murder, meanwhile, blacks are nearly six times more likely than whites to die.) There are just three places in the U.S. where the overall homicide rate is higher than the suicide rate: Louisiana, Maryland and the District of Columbia. It’s not a coincidence that these are also places with large African-American populations. Donna Barnes, who founded the National Organization for People of Color Against Suicide, tries to explain why there’s such a huge black-white suicide gap:
BARNES: Okay, it’s very easy when you are stressed and you don’t want to live anymore and put yourself in harm’s way and somebody will take you out. We get angry. We get irritable. We do things, we engage in reckless behavior more so than say, the dominant culture. And those are signs of depression. And many times we will externalize our frustration meaning that we’re going to take it out on other people. And then you might have more folks maybe from the dominant culture who internalize their frustration and take it out on themselves. We have been socialized to believe that a lot of our disadvantages are based on our surroundings — racism, discrimination and all of that. So it’s really easy, for us, when we become frustrated and we look at what’s going on around us, to take it out on the environment and other people rather than ourselves."
Race in the US is always a more important factor than wealth. When controlling for wealth, outcomes for Black Americans routinely underperform those of whites.
I am sorry, but I can’t believe that a black billionaire has it worse than a white homeless person. How can you say that race is always more important than wealth? This is simply ridiculous.
There is a huge economic disparity between the average black person and the average white person. That means that race is intertwined with almost every class issue in America.
Studies like this makes me realize that it's impossible to predict trends in society by using logic alone. At the start of Covid pandemic I heard arguments that birth rates would go up (couples at home with plenty of time for sex) or that they would go down (not a good time to have a baby with hospitals overflowing and an uncertain future). Which was right? And what about murders: Would it go down because people have to stay home and bars were closed so less chance for drunken fights? Would it go up because people are frustrated and desperate with no jobs and no money?
We now know the answers to the above (both births and murders went down during the past year), but as far as I know we can't prove the precise reason it happened the way it did.
It reminds me of the big debates we had right here on Hacker News about why Americans were slim in the 1950s -- just look at photos of crowds from the 1950s -- but are overweight today. We know what happened but we can't prove the precise reason.
>Studies like this makes me realize that it's impossible to predict trends in society by using logic alone. At the start of Covid pandemic
That is because people who claim to be using the logic to the most tend to correlate with people why have astonishingly little knowledge about the topic at hand. They create over simplified model and ignore wast amount of studies and evidence that says their model is not conforming with real life.
> I heard arguments that birth rates would go up (couples at home with plenty of time for sex) or that they would go down (not a good time to have a baby with hospitals overflowing and an uncertain future). Which was right?
Sociologists were right, births went down, as pretty much always when there is large uncertainty and threat.People in the past did not made more babies when facing economic or health issues. People dont have babies when there is war. People dont have babies when they fear future.
Plus, the other claim does not even makes logical sense. Anti-contraception exists, people can have sex without making babies, lack of time for sex is not why people don't have kids. Plus, videogames and netflix exists, it is not like there would be nothing to do.
The point here is that the logical argument was not logical and ignored pretty much all what sociologists know about human behavior.
These numbers are completely ignoring a massive mental health crisis. I have multiple psychologist friends who are beyond booked solid for the next while and have never seen this high of demand.
As well my ems friends say that suicide ideation and suicide attempts are way way up. As well as alcohol and drug poisoning cases (which are not marked as suicides usually)
We almost certainly have not. I would expect at the very least an increase in PTSD cases. I might speculate there could be an increase in other anxiety disorders, for instance, social anxiety or mild agoraphobia. Although it isn't totally clear, there is some suggestion from the research that the number of prior depressive episodes is a risk factor for having another one [0].
Definitely agree that there is a mental health crisis.
I wonder if some booking of psychologists & therapists might have to do with people now having liquid cash they can use to address things they couldn't in the past and a relative absence of other things to spend money on.
Anecdotally, it's been much easier for me to see my therapist since covid started. Instead of having to take time off work to go to their office, everything is done over the phone.
which has the UK's latest suicide data which is published quarterly and one stand-out that is very much relevant to suicide statistics globally during this pandemic and I quote:
"The increase in registered suicides during the third quarter of 2020 likely reflects the resuming of coroner’s inquests"
That right there is a huge factor and why I really don't feel we will know the true extent upon suicide until later this year, and few years after.
It's worth bearing in mind that, as I understand it, other countries haven't yet released their suicide numbers for the period of the pandemic during which Japan's suicide rates rose - they apparently publish theirs more promptly than most places for some reason, which is why people have been keeping an eye on Japan as an early warning.
Wouldn't attempts go up after the pandemic, when the effects have had time to propagate, and not during? Similarly, during normal times attempts go up not during the winter but in the spring, after people have had time to absorb the effects of winter.
"Results showed recent suicidal ideation was 1.60 and 1.45 times higher in March and July 2020, respectively, than in March and July 2019. Odds of recent suicide attempt were 1.58, 2.34, 1.75 and 1.77 times higher in February, March, April and July 2020 than the same months in 2019, respectively."
Ideation and attempt is not the same as death, but it is pretty alarming on its own.
Additionally, I would expect that the longer lockdown gets, the higher suicide rate. Social isolation may take time to "kick in", in the meantime more people got out of business (or run in other serious troubles), and (likely) there was more hope in the first months for things to be over soon.
I wonder if one mechanism is that the pandemic has affected everyone - some people worse than others of course, but we're all affected, there is this THING that we have in common with everyone else.
Empathy from others is really important. There was a paper today about why chronically ill people kill themselves and the biggest reason is their doctors not believing them and trying to plying them with anti depressants instead of helping them with their real symptoms. It is a consistent thing you see before chronically ill people kill themselves, the belief that no one is going to help them now or ever (they are right by the way there is no one who is going to help them, their situation is likely never going to get better especially in areas with little to no research).
With the pandemic you can find someone else going through the same sort of thing, they will have empathy about their shared experience. For most people this level of isolation is temporary however, for the disabled this is their every day and they also on a day to day before the pandemic they didn't have this empathy from anyone, from their family nor their doctors. It is about the best it has ever been for the chronically ill, people for once have some empathy for what they are going through but I suspect it wont last.
This is also critical with PTSD in soldiers. It used to be thought that war trauma was the primary factor in veteran PTSD, but ongoing research is revealing that being part of a close group and then losing that contact and trust can have a devastating psychological impact.
In the past year I have learnt an awful lot about the historic and current maltreatments of a lot of ill people. Medicine is often held on a pedestal as a good example but the reality seems to be they jump to conclusions without good evidence all the time, sometimes they can be found to gaslight patients for decades, ME patients its nearly a century now and covid long haulers are suffering the consequences of that inaction. I have lost a lot of respect for doctors and medical research over the past few years.
I suspect pretty much every "mental health" issue will at some point finally be tracked to a physical condition, potentially something we could have been treating decades beforehand if they had bothered to look.
I don't know what underpins PTSD, I just know I wouldn't jump to any conclusion. I would want researchers to never stopping looking for answers until we genuinely understand what physically is going on in those individuals bodies. Talk therapy has too long been used to paper over that understanding and tried to tell people they are really just well if they thought differently and I am not convinced that Psychology should be funded as medicine given how it gets it wrong more than it gets it right and can't even get its diagnoses straight. Gulf war syndrome is a physical condition, it is basically PVCS/ME/Fybromylgia but for decades it was considered Psychological. I am constantly appalled by medicines practices.
I think that's true in some circles, this sense of shared empathy. But most people I'm around exude a sense of annoyance over the pandemic restrictions (regardless of how seriously they take covid). I suppose this might count as empathy, in a strange way.
By all I have read, families with small kids have more financial troubles. And the biggest hit was on single moms. They had double hit of both childcare becoming super difficult and the kind of jobs low paid women have (service) being hit the most.
Here's quick guess of an explanation: introverts are more likely to commit suicide because they are less likely to benefit from support of other people if they are in a vulnerable state.
Self-isolation meant they are subject to less stress because much fewer social interactions are forced upon them, and they feel good about themselves - as requirement to self-isolate suddenly turned them from "weirdos" to "exemplary citizens". In a way, everyone is forced to become an introvert these days, except for actual introverts, it's effortless and the world works in a lot more "their way" today.
Personally i relate to this 100%. Another lockdown was announced hours ago and i suddenly feel i'm happy. I literally missed the lockdown days.
Random guess: Is it because people are less likely to be alone at home (family, roommates), making it harder to pull off the act without someone intervening?
I disagree and having had two friends die to suicide this year already and many others on the verge, I wouldn't say this is that clear cut. After all, suicide by health neglect is a thing and easily gets wrapped up because somebody let themselves die from covid-19 and not call ambulance - so yeah. I'd not good news this one just yet.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I don't think anyone is suggesting suicide is no longer an issue- it most definitely is. However, anecdata is not a great metric for measuring large society-level changes.
Thank you. Yes you are right it is not the best, but then is a sample of a short period of time at the start of a pandemic indicative of the entire pandemic. The true impact upon suicide is hard to really measure in such and certainly the only true picture will be a few years from now and having a few years worth of data. I dare say be many latent ones down to the economic impacts and other knock-on effects.
[ADD] I looked and in the UK the rate has increased and been noted that that the aspect that coroner’s inquests initially at the start of the pandemic had been suspended due to caution in contamination and spread as we was still learning about the virus. An aspect that I'm sure mirror's in many countries globally.
I think that would be a difficult conclusion to make. As several people have pointed out, suicidal ideation reports have spike higher during the same time. There are a ton of possible reasons people aren't dying from suicide, but there were more attempts during this time suggesting that your thesis isn't super strongly supported.
Can’t see because of paywall, but wonder if it broken down by age. I recall seeing reports of school districts that were talking about increased suicide rate among teenagers in certain school districts.
I work with a covid downplayer that was a covid denier up until a few months ago. They would say that this is proof that almost all deaths are being reported as covid in an attempt to make it seem more serious. I'll just avoid the topic.
I was sort of wondering about this in a different way: How many nursing home suicides were preempted by an actual COVID-19 death? From a quick glance at the data, I don't think it would have accounted for the 5.7% drop, but I think it's worth considering among other factors.
Is nursing home suicide a common thing? It's not something I've ever heard of before (and not something I would have any personal connection to). A couple minutes of googling seems to imply that nursing home rates are actually lower than general population, but maybe I'm not finding the right studies?
I thought maybe people would be generally unhappy in those circumstances but maybe not. As for numbers I'd only looked at age group and yeah it didn't seem to go much higher than middle age.
Again, it was just a thought that crossed my mind and I decided at best it didn't account for the whole drop.
I could see a lot of people being unhappy because they're forced to live in a nursing home. But, when I think about the ways someone would commit suicide, and how many of them are available to a nursing home resident, it just doesn't sound like there's a lot of opportunity. I wonder if there's any good research on the topic.
I sincerely doubt the tag line, “Financial support from governments may have reduced one potential cause of despair” has absolutely anything to do with it
Suicide is rarely about true despair, I would say it is more about loss of purpose. When you are scrounging to get by or have bigger fish to fry than some existential demons, suicide falls to the back of your mind. When there is time to ponder bigger questions it returns.
This comment is romanticised nonsense which is consistently opposed by research.
Suicide rates are strongly linked to socioeconomic status. Being in the 1st decile for income gives you a more than double risk than being in the 10th decile (and the risk is still higher among even poorer people).
> This comment is romanticised nonsense which is consistently opposed by research.
Suicide rates fluctuate wildly over time though, so trying to understand suicide by looking at relative rates within a given year is going to give you at best an incomplete picture.
Suicide is not mainly determined by absolute poverty. That doesn't mean that socioeconomic factors or financial ruin are irrelevant but it questions the idea that suicide is mainly about material circumstances.
The parent comment clearly references relative poverty, within one individual and therefore within one country.
Science is imperfect. If you don't like the results that science has told us, you can claim the opposite and you can believe the opposite, citing exceptions, as you have done.
But, that doesn't make the opposite true. You can provide your evidence also (in my personal opinion, a link to Wikipedia doesn't count as evidence).
What makes you think you can compare across countries? Why do you think "absolute" poverty is important? My buying power isn't materially reduced simply because another country might have a higher per capita income than the one I live in.
If you want to ask the question "what causes suicide?" you have to generalize. It seems strange to suggest that you can't generalize between countries. You might as well say "how can you compare Tim's suicide to Susan's suicide, they lived totally different lives". Are we only allowed to compare suicides in twin studies?
It's plausible that absolute poverty would be the main factor in suicide, i.e. privation and resulting suffering would drive people to suicide. Though plausible, that doesn't seem to be the case, which is interesting.
Glancing at the data on wikipedia, there seem to be cultural and religious factors at play here that dwarf economic factors (not to mention sex...). Muslim countries have low rates of suicide. Japan and Korea have high rates of suicide. It's totally fine to look for correlations along economic lines but that's a lot more to the story and it isn't wrong to bring that up.
Why does it seem strange to suggest one can't generalize across countries? What does the life of the average American have in common with the life of the average Saudi Arabian or Chinese person, for instance?
As far as poverty goes, I don't see any reason at all that absolute poverty should mean anything. Again, my buying power isn't materially affected by that of people in Europe, for instance, but my buying power certainly has a huge absolute effect on my quality of life. I would expect the effect of poverty on suicide rates to be stronger per country than worldwide for this reason, and also that what is considered poor in the United States would be unimaginably rich in some countries.
And, those cultural factors are precisely what makes it difficult to compare across countries. The amount of statistical adjustment you'd have to do to compare across even 10 countries would probably swamp most of the non-cultural effects is my guess.
> Why does it seem strange to suggest one can't generalize across countries? What does the life of the average American have in common with the life of the average Saudi Arabian or Chinese person, for instance?
Uh, they're all humans?
> As far as poverty goes, I don't see any reason at all that absolute poverty should mean anything. Again, my buying power isn't materially affected by that of people in Europe, for instance, but my buying power certainly has a huge absolute effect on my quality of life. I would expect the effect of poverty on suicide rates to be stronger per country than worldwide for this reason, and also that what is considered poor in the United States would be unimaginably rich in some countries.
If you don't think it's plausible that abject suffering would lead someone to suicide I don't know what to say.
You only want to talk about "purchasing power" but my whole point is that there are lots of other factors. You can talk about purchasing power but you shouldn't dismiss people talking about those other factors.
> And, those cultural factors are precisely what makes it difficult to compare across countries. The amount of statistical adjustment you'd have to do to compare across even 10 countries would probably swamp most of the non-cultural effects is my guess.
...and personality differences make it difficult to compare across individual humans. None of these studies are controlling for all relevant factors, most of which are probably unknown or at least unmeasured.
If "they're all human" is all you can come up with, I think that essentially proves my point. Cultural factors are likely to be difficult to detangle from the whole mess of what's going on.
As far as abject suffering goes, I agree, that probably doesn't help the suicide rate. But, what I've been getting at is this: you keep referring to "absolute poverty," and I'm telling you I don't think "absolute poverty" is it. I think it's plain old poverty, which is relative poverty, which has to do with what one's local purchasing power is.
"Abject suffering" is relative, too. What you might call "abject suffering," someone in another country might just call "Tuesday." Conversely, someone used to living very well who ends up losing everything financially might feel extreme despair. Think 2008, or 1929.
In other words, add all those cultural factors on, and what an American might want to end it all over, a Pakistani (to pick a random example) might not. If you did a study with 10 countries, then you'd have 45 pairs to consider, and, like I said, that gets messy quickly.
This is roughly why I suspect there aren't any good studies that do what you suggest. Almost all the studies of this nature concentrate on a single country, and I suspect it's because the research itself would be difficult, but, also that it would be extremely tough to make any cross-cultural conclusions, which is what you want to do if you want to know what makes "humans" want to kill themselves.
>"Abject suffering" is relative, too. What you might call "abject suffering," someone in another country might just call "Tuesday." Conversely, someone used to living very well who ends up losing everything financially might feel extreme despair. Think 2008, or 1929.
I don't agree that all suffering is relative. I don't believe that Pakistanis experience starvation less severely than Americans. Maybe human suffering is relative to being a human.
I understand that you think relative poverty causes suicide. That's not important to my argument which (following from the original commenter's) is "there are other interesting variables that affect suicide besides relative poverty".
You keep bringing up how culture is hard to control for. But a study of only South Korea doesn't control for culture. The correlation between relative poverty and suicide is probably higher in SK for cultural reasons (which is, of course, why SK was chosen). My point is that culture (among other things) is an interesting factor in suicide. It could be studied too. It's fine to look for the effect of relative poverty within a country but it's also interesting to look for other things, like culture and absolute poverty and levels of industrialization.
I don't think this is true. A large percentage of suicides are associated with financial ruin, e.g. you're losing your house to foreclosure and about to be homeless. Preventing these situations by financial means would thus prevent said suicides.
As others have pointed out, this doesn't seem to align with data about suicides. I'll add to the list, chronic pain carries a much higher risk of suicide as well.
I'm sure there are many other factors and it's hard to point at any one as a real, root cause, but I don't think that existential dread or ennui or whatever you name it is the root cause either.
As an aside, if I were a poor, suicidal person, I'd probably take extreme issue with your comment as somehow implying that I'm not 'doing being suicidal right' or something like that, since I'm apparently being suicidal when I should be thinking about my three part-time jobs. (I'm not, I don't take personal offense, I'm just expressing how I suppose someone might see this mentality, and how it could be seen as insensitive. Although, these people do have bigger problems than internet comments, and any kind of correction here wouldn't fix that.)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/147/3/e202002...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4095
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33533876/
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-imp...
On a more anecdotal note, I'm personally close to a therapist, and they're busier with SI patients than ever. They're also overwhelmed with demand, in general, having seen a significant increase in both patients and patients with SI over the course of 2020.