Citation

Seposo XT. Asian J. Psychiatry 2021; 60: e102660.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2021.102660

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

rom 2010, number of suicide deaths have been decreasing in Japan, up until the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, or clinically referred to as COVID-19, on December 2019 in Wuhan, China (Zhou et al., 2020). The unprecedented global spread of the disease has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to classify the disease as a pandemic. Several countries imposed national lockdowns, initiated mass testing, introduced quarantine classifications and new lifestyle regulations with the hope to control the pandemic (Han et al., 2020). Japan is no exception; the country implemented a nationwide state of emergency from April to May (Tanaka and Okamoto, 2021). While movement restrictions have been in place, together with limited indoor/outdoor activities and the reduced economic activity, it was inevitable that the mental health of several populations may have been compromised (Gunnell et al., 2020). In this research letter, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on suicide risk in Japan was elucidated using an 11-year, prefecture-specific, monthly data.

In brief, the 47 Japanese prefecture-specific monthly suicide data from January 2010 - December 2020 were obtained from publicly available sources (National Police Agency, 2020). A classical interrupted time series was used to estimate the prefecture-specific pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 period-specific associations. Monthly suicide counts were modeled with a Poisson distribution. Covariates included an offset of the log of population, month of reported suicide, together with the main and interaction effects of time and intervention. Intervention was assumed as a binary variable which takes the value of 0 for Pre-COVID-19 period (2010-2019), whereas, 1 for COVID-19 period (2020). Prefecture-specific estimates were then pooled using a random effects meta-analysis. All estimates represent either the relative risk (RR) alongside their respective confidence intervals (CI) or the change in the risk; estimated as (RR - 1) x 100. All analyses were carried out using R Statistical Programming.

Nationwide total number of suicide cases from 2010 to 2020 was 271,870. Even though the mean monthly suicide cases before the pandemic (mean = 2091.26; [standard deviation (SD): 380.29], was statistically higher than the COVID-19 pandemic mean (= 1743.25; SD = 208.57; P value < 0.001), the slope of the trends varied substantially as shown...

Language: en