Is the Pandemic Sparking Suicide?
Date Posted: May 19, 2020
Posted In: COVID-19 Updates, Discussion,
From NY Times: The mental health toll of the coronavirus pandemic is only beginning to show itself, and it is too early to predict the scale of the impact.
The coronavirus pandemic is an altogether different kind of cataclysm — an ongoing, wavelike, poorly understood threat that seems to be both everywhere and nowhere, a contagion nearly as psychological as it is physical. Death feels closer, even well away from the front lines of emergency rooms, and social isolation — which in pre-Covid times was often a sign of a mind turning in on itself — is the new normal for tens of millions of people around the world.
The ultimate marker of the virus’s mental toll, some experts say, will show up in the nation’s suicide rate, in this and coming years. The immediate effect is not at all clear, despite President Trump’s recent claim that lockdown conditions were causing deaths. “Just look at what’s happening with drug addiction, look at what’s happening with suicides,” he said in a press briefing in the White House Rose Garden on Monday.
In fact, doctors won’t know for many months if suicide is spiking in 2020; each death must be carefully investigated to determine its cause. The rolling impact of Covid-19 on these rates give scientists a sense of how extended uncertainty and repeating undercurrents of anxiety affect people’s will to live.
“It’s a natural experiment, in a way,” said Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. “There’s not only an increase in anxiety, but the more important piece is social isolation.” He added, “We’ve never had anything like this — and we know social isolation is related to suicide.”
The earliest signs of whether the pandemic is driving up suicides will likely emerge among those who have had a history of managing persistent waves of self-destructive distress. Many of these people, who number in the millions worldwide, go through each day compulsively tuned to the world’s casual cruelties — its suspicious glances and rude remarks — and are prone to isolate themselves, at times contemplating a final exit plan.
“That’s how I am,” said Josh, 35, a college instructor in North Carolina who has been consumed in the past with thoughts of suicide. “I see all the bad, the suffering, and I have a tendency to crawl into a hole. Now, with this Covid threat, we’re being told to isolate and stay away from others. It’s like, ‘Oh, I was right all along, and the world was crazy.’”
Research done in the wake of natural disasters offers little guidance as to how this group will respond. In a widely cited 1999 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, in communities hit by an earthquake, flood or hurricane, rates of suicide spiked in the years after. But the study authors later retracted that finding, after discovering an error that, when corrected, revealed “no significant increase in suicide rates after natural disasters, either for all types of disasters combined or for individual types of disasters.” Other studies have found increases, or decreases, depending on the group and disaster studied.