Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

While it's kind of a non-event, and given that it's only the early months of the pandemic maybe not even a particularly surprising non-event, I think it is important that even studies which don't find anything noteworthy get published. So, while I still have serious concerns about the long-term mental health impacts of the pandemic (for several reasons), I do think it's good that this got published.

View on HN

Why do you say that this isn't noteworthy?

They found there was no significant increase in suicide in any of the 35 regions they studied, and in fact found a statistically significant decrease in suicide in 12 of them. Given that many people were concerned there might be an increase in suicides due to pandemic lockdowns, particularly in the early months when restrictions were most severe, this seems like a very noteworthy result.

Yeah, I don't know how many times on HN I've seen comments like "we need to open things up because suicides are up due to shutdowns!" without any supporting data. And now we see suicides were actually down in some places and mostly unchanged everywhere else.

The data doesn't show that lockdowns didn't cause suicide, either though. For example, Norway is in the dataset, and Norway didn't lock down, or only locked down for a couple weeks. It might also be interesting to see what the results were in urban areas with tight restrictions, maybe even in countries with already high suicide rates, like South Korea and Japan, to see the results. But either way, you cannot isolate the "lockdown" variable because there was a full spectrum of policy responses from different countries, cities, and subregions. So, let's just say the jury is still out.

We know that social isolation causes depression. We know that economic hardship causes depression. When people argue against lockdowns, this is why.

We had more lockdowns, we didnt have more suicides, how is that not showing the claim doesnt hold?

There are hundreds of stories like this one by NPR, which not an expected source for anti-lockdown fake news:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/02/9620601...

So people read it and think the suicide rate is going up. It may actually be going up for some groups in some places, but the bigger message here is that the media loves a good horror story, and is willing to report anything based on anecdotes.

But deaths of despair are on the rise. Perhaps pro-lockdown and anti-lockdown people focus on the wrong data points.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/deaths-of-despair-depres...

I wouldn't really expect suicides to rise much within the first few months, if at all. It's 3+ months an onward that I would expect to start seeing increases due to prolonged isolation.

But this was just for the first three months, and for those regions... I'm not for hasty reopenings, rather for more money for mental health, and intuition says the loss of jobs and financial security must have an effect on mental health, and unfortunately along with that, suicides.

E.g. in India: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-06/suicid...

People who rejoice about this study because they want to use it to defend policies that are criticized for potential negative mental health impacts willingly neglect the nature of suicide: Of course sucide numbers go down because many suicidal people want their death to be noticed.

Say the policies are lifted and suicides go up again, will the rejoicing ones account for that as well? Of course not, they will rather gaslight the argument by blaming the increase on the lifting

That caveat about this only covering the first few months of the pandemic is actually important. I know that Japan for example has seen a substantial rise in suicides but it happened after the time period covered by this article (though well before it was actually published).

Yes. One of the authors is very clear that this is early data.

https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1382248431272480769?...

  What is message from our new paper showing no rise in suicide in pandemic? 
  •early figures, risks remain, #suicideprevention still a priority
  •main risk is economic downturn - protecting income, jobs, housing vital 
  •MH care & community supports needed for those most at risk

https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1382257477111140358?...

  Some cautions re our new paper on suicide post-Covid
  •England data not included, to be reported soon
  •mainly rich countries, impact may be greater in poorer parts of world 
  •early figs, we are still in mid-pandemic
  •no analysis by age, race or region

Reply on news.ycombinator.com