Why didn't suicides rise during Covid?
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For me, life got easier and less stress free, mainly because I don't ever have to go outside and I got to work from home, which pretty much solved the "social anxiety" issue for me. I never felt comfortable at office and felt always stressed. So I've been happy and relieved about being locked in.
Whether it's good in the long term, I'm not sure however, because I will get even less experience putting myself out there.
I found a similar experience. Working from home is VERY good for my mental health. My anxiety almost disappeared completely at times.
My dilemma is similar to yours. I have the ability to work from home forever now and never attend another in-person meeting again (became self-employed during COVID).
However, like you, I recognise that I’ll need to ensure I don’t become a complete recluse and never leave the apartment! :)
During that time of reduced anxiety, I was able to introspect a bit more without external stressors and was able to identify some trauma that led to the depression and anxiety -- something that I wasn't even aware was affecting me.
I really don't know how to actually deal with said trauma, so I'll be going to therapy for that, but I think the lessons I learned and the benefits I gained will stick with me since I'm taking concrete steps to deal with it now that I've identified a problem.
Without the year long pause we all went through I'm not sure I would have had the time to sort through my brain so thoroughly.
> Without the year long pause we all went through I'm not sure I would have had the time to sort through my brain so thoroughly.
I feel exactly the same way.
Re: therapy, if you haven’t done it before, be prepared that you might need to try a couple of different therapists to get the right fit. But it sounds like the absolute right thing for you to be doing. You definitely need someone to work through it with you.
Good luck!
There's plenty of mention and data to support it, like decreased number of miscarriages.
Anecdotally, I know a number of Alzheimer patients in care facilities did much better when their families weren't allowed to visit them. Painful of course, but probably just related to 'normal' life in these homes being too crazy and them needing more quiet space. Others did worse.
I'm sure many people experienced sudden and traumatizing depression with the onset of Covid. But we mostly all knew it would be temporary - we knew things would get better again, even if we didn't know the timelines. There wasn't a "forever" there, so suicide wasn't a common reaction.
Going all the way down in the 90's made me aware that "this too shall pass" is a way of life I live by.
As a coping mechanism, waiting out the tough times seems to work.
I wonder how many people could be helped by knowing that the glib "it gets better" is true, "but you have to feel like this until then" is the part they don't remind you of?
I think you're assuming "this is when a rational actor would commit suicide". And for some people, e.g. the terminally ill, this is true.
From my own experience with depression, it's the lack of joy rather than the sadness that is hard to suffer through. It's helplessness rather than sadness, a loss of feeling rather than feeling too much. But depression shrinks any perspective on tomorrow and just leaves you powerless in the here and now, though not in a good way. It's more like having to give up because everything is too heavy, a felt sense of not being able to affect your world. Sadness itself due to bad events is usually not a problem, it's part of life even if we attempt to eradicate it. The problem begins when you get stuck in the sadness, and then everything shrinks away in a dark void where you don't feel sadness nor joy, just a heavy, tired numbness.
Sometimes a depressed person's initial stage out of a depression is the one where he or she is most at risk of committing suicide. Because you need to feel some sense of control and overcome your fears in order to do it.
And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
The only reason this comes as a surprise to so many people is that capitalism suggests that all progress is inherently good with no contingencies, or it draws a binary between progress and regression. Associated with that is American hyper-individualism. Ask a Marxist, for example, and they will offer an understanding of society which centers those who reproduce it, and along with that a sophisticated interest in theories of alienation and the role alienation plays in a person’s relations to their society. For a Marxist, these statistics would have been expected.
Well said. This goes beyond even the socioeconomic causes of suicide that you mentioned and surely includes people with depression, (social) anxiety disorders, etc.
Going to office etc, left me with constant worries and thought cycles, energy spent on analysing and overthinking social situations. Now there's just video calls/chat messages I have to worry about and there's fewer attack vectors for worries there.
Same with random/events parties happening, even with friends I never felt very comfortable attending. Now I always had the perfect excuse to just stay at home.
Exactly, and I'd expect them to rise once things go back to "normal" because those who were already in a bad situation before Covid will rightfully feel left behind once more.
People spent more time with their families.
The government literally handed out free money to everyone.
A moratorium was placed on evictions.
For a lot of poorer people, this was a weird, but not necessary bad year.
>I’m tempted to wonder if people are misclassifying suicides as overdoses
Which would not surprise me in the least given the data is coming from CDC. Everyone from all sides seem to agree that CDC lost lots of credibility with coronavirus.
At least in the UK, government support was not enough to replace full-time incomes, so those living month to month would have had a very tough time on a reduced income.
I know of lots of well paid people who were happily furloughed and took “free money”, and others who carried on working, with arguably better working conditions (from home, no committing, lower costs)
But for many people in lower paid jobs and with lower incomes I’m sure the situation has been very depressing at times. Not to mention those who I’ve been very ill or lost loved ones.
I have had a very positive COVID experience. Really all of the benefits and none of the downsides (so far). I expected many on HN will be the same. Most of us can comfortably work from home, many already did, and we are (on average) a well paid group.
But I’ve also felt incredibly guilty at times at how “happy” I’ve been at various points during lockdown, while knowing full well that many others are having the exact opposite experience.
Still, I don't think it will result in an increased number of suicides - because there is hope that things will be over soon.
When things reopen and the economy collapse / the recession hits / the bubble burst, I think we'll see more suicides.
To attribute every suicide as an overdose is wrong on many levels.
you may argue a heroin addict has a right to heroin, but does a pangolin scale juicer have that right also and is the government now responsible for supplying them with safe pangolin scales?
what is the "correct" amount of heroin a person should be able to get from a pharmacy? how much should that cost? what if the "correct" amount for me is just under lethal dose and im essentially comatose between hits? is that society's responsibility to nurture my addiction. why is a single state-issued dose compassionate care, when many addicts need 4 or 5 doses per day to feel good? when i can longer afford the pharmaceutical dose, won't i just go back to street heroin?
if it's blindingly obvious that no state should seek to ensure that a "just-under-lethal-comatose-all-day" type of habit is supported and funded by the state, why would the state think it has some obligation to fund and support any habit at all. people get hooked on gambling and sky-diving too, but no reasonable people think it's the state's responsibility to maintain those.
beyond that, it becomes a cost-benefit analysis for the rest of us. unlike gambling or sky-diving, drugs of abuse are pretty cheap to manufacture. it might be cheaper to just give people drugs than to deal with the constant petty theft perpetrated by addicts. or it might not be, who knows?
The drug war can be won, but it will be compassion, empathy, and the invisible hand of the market that wins it. If there's high demand for something illegal, and there's a bunch of negative externalities to the illegal trade, it seems smarter to have some moderated legal trade to put the illegal trade out of business.
A relatively simple plan that isn't perfect but is arguably much better than what we have today would be something like this: if you are a drug addict, you can get a drug test to prove you are hooked, and then get on a free but gently tapered government supply with optional therapy. "Club" drugs that people will generally do sporadically (cocaine, MDMA, shrooms) are sold over the counter with either a positive drug test or a street sample, limited with a personal use quota. The government drugs are all chemically tagged or variants not available on the street, so it will be possible to detect and respond to diversion.
As a drug dealer, this would be a nightmare, since all your best customers will disappear, and you can't even smurf the government supply because your smurfs keep getting caught clean (diverting) and get their supply cut off.
They do. Can you point me to the page you read about heroin maintenance that didn't include anything about the consequences?
> you may argue a heroin addict has a right to heroin
Nobody has a right to heroin. What people have is a right to life; a right to health; a right to not be harmed by treatment. Current treatment for heroin addiction, especially if it's based on abstinence alone, violates each of these. Heroin substitutes are best, but they're not suitable for everyone and some people are not ready to move onto a substitute. In these cases we should provide legal heroin to maintain the habit. This would preserve this person's rights. Importantly, it would preserve the rights of the people around this person. This person no longer has to steal or sell sex in order to fund their habit.
> but does a pangolin scale juicer
I genuinely have no idea what point you're trying to make with "pangolin scale juice".
> what is the "correct" amount of heroin
Enough to maintain their current use pattern, with the aim to gradually reduce and then switch to a substitute. But with the recognition that just giving people heroin for the rest of their life is better for them and for the rest of society than forcing them to get illicit opioids.
> how much should that cost?
Diamorphine is incredibly cheap. Providing diamorphine in a safe setting is costly - you need a trained, qualified, registered, healthcare professional to monitor patients who are self injecting. You need a building that's insured and cleaned, run by a service that's subject to some form of oversight. But, again, all of this is far cheaper than just leaving addicts to source illicit opioids.
> what if the "correct" amount for me is just under lethal dose and im essentially comatose between hits?
You should probably stop talking about addiction if you're this ignorant.
> is that society's responsibility to nurture my addiction.
You keep saying things like this, and it highlights how you've fundamentally misunderstood the point. We're not "nurturing addiction", we are treating addiction with a safe, effective, evidence-based approach. Why do we give insulin to T1 diabetics? Are we nurturing their diabetes? No, it's fucking stupid to say so. We're treating a chronic health condition.
> why is a single state-issued dose compassionate care, when many addicts need 4 or 5 doses per day to feel good?
Addicts don't take heroin to feel good. They take heroin to avoid feeling bad.
> when i can longer afford the pharmaceutical dose, won't i just go back to street heroin?
Yes, which is one of the reasons
> people get hooked on gambling and sky-diving too, but no reasonable people think it's the state's responsibility to maintain those.
We should be providing addiction services to people who are addicted to gambling. So far the evidence for problem gambling is clear: more gambling is harmful, not helpful. This is the reason we don't recommend subsidising gambling for problem gamblers.
Seems like you're cherry picking data which somewhat supports your hypothesis while ignoring the more recent data which does not.
For those that want to draw their own conclusions, here's the data:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over...
Are you implying that had nothing to do with the socioeconomic situation unique to that year?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/pandemic-safety-meas...
Regardless, I think it’s interesting how we all just assumed they had to go up during lock down. It’s a reminder that depression is very complex, and our intuitions about how to fix it can be wildly off.
https://fee.org/articles/a-years-worth-of-suicide-attempts-i...
And on the east coast in GA, the same,
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lockdown-suicides-on-t...
These articles are during the low point stated in the OP article.
I'm most familiar with the English data and SA gets a fair amount wrong. In England the message is very much "no rise yet, but we need to be cautious about the future".
As a simple example the FEE article is nothing but random anecdotes, while the NR article does not have supporting data for the headline claim but tries to play a similar game by suggesting that opioid overdose deaths should be categorized as either suicides or suicide attempts. Articles attempting to manufacture a suicide problem related to the lockdown also tend to mix in 'suicide ideation' with suicide attempts, usually while ignoring the fact that surveys of such ideation have almost no depth to them and seem to be a recent invention to try to answer the undeniable fact that actual suicides have decreased.
Known to who? Do you have a list of approved sources we are allowed to use and are not sharing?