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Abstract
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Dear Editor,
COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation measures have affected the mental health of millions of people across the world (Tandon, 2020). There is a surge of mental health issues (e.g., fear of COVID-19 infection, anxiety, stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression) among the general population and health care workers (Rajkumar, 2020; Ransing et al., 2020a). Published case reports and experiences from past-epidemics (e.g.SARS in Hongkong) suggest that these mental health issues can lead to suicide in an individual with or without pre-existing mental or medical illness (Goyal et al., 2020). Suicide is a grave public health problem, a hidden and silent epidemic, and the leading cause of death in India even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, there are high possibilities that suicidal behavior and suicide rate may have increased in this pandemic. So far, there are only a few published case reports related to COVID-19 suicides (Goyal et al., 2020; Mamun and Griffiths, 2020). In our knowledge, the risk factors, socio-demographic, and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 related suicides have not yet been extensively studied. Therefore, we attempted to explore the features of completed suicides.
In this retrospective study, two authors (SS and RR) independently searched all English and local newspapers published and circulated in India for reports with completed suicides. In google search engine with ‘news’ as a filter, we used the terms ‘suicide,’ ‘India,’ ‘Corona,’’ COVID-19’, ‘Self-harm,’ and ‘Names of Indian states’(e.g., Kerala, Maharashtra) in different combinations to search the news reports published from 25th January 2020 to 18th April 2020. The cases with attempted suicides, reports from T.V. listing, advertisement, or non-reliable sources, and suicide-related to substance use withdrawal were excluded. The semi-structured form (that includes, e.g., age, gender, reasons, and method of suicide)was used for the evaluation of each report. The data with discrepancies were reevaluated and reassessed jointly before final inclusion. The COVID-2019 situation reports (WHO), the total number of deaths, and suicide deaths due to COVID-19 was used to construct the cumulative frequency curve ...
Language: en |