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Abstract
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In an international healthcare crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, real-time dissemination of accurate information becomes critical in order to enable healthcare and policy decision-making in a situation of urgency with substantial uncertainty. Amidst an atmosphere of fear, rife with wild speculation and rumor, information is vital; when gathered and processed more rapidly, however, its quality can be compromised. In several prior editorials, we have shared our Journal's challenges in balancing the twin imperatives of timeliness (expedited reviews) and scientific rigor (managing contributions with new and less certain information) with regard to our responsibility in this effort (Tandon, 2020a; and 2020b). In this editorial, I briefly examine how our field has addressed the topic of suicide in the context of COVID-19 and what we have learned about rates/patterns of suicide during the 16 months of the pandemic thus far. I present guidance from an international collaborative focused on this problem (quoting key excerpts of a letter that was sent to the Journal editor; Knipe et al., 2020) and suggest some key learnings.
At the onset of the pandemic, several mental health experts warned the world to prepare for a concurrent increase in rates of suicide using phrases such as "a tsunami of suicide", "dual pandemic of suicide and COVID-19″, and "suicide mortality and COVID-19- a perfect storm" (Banerjee et al., 2021; McIntyre and Lee, 2020; Reger et al., 2020; Thakur and Jain, 2020). International organizations stepped in with recommendations as to how to address this impending public health challenge (Gunnell et al., 2020; Wasserman et al., 2020).
In the first few months of the viral pandemic, there were scattered media reports of individual instances of suicide ostensibly related to the effect of COVID-19 and several articles published in scientific journals that principally relied on such media reports (e.g., Mamun and Griffiths, 2020; Rajkumar, 2020; Syed and Griffiths, 2020). Other articles in scientific journals on the topic either based their observations/conclusions on non-databased theorizing or data derived from unrepresentative and inadequately designed cross-sectional surveys (Charlier, 2021; Inoue et al., 2020). The principal implication of these reports was that suicide rates were increasing in association with the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention focused on a particular group in some of these articles.
Analyses of actual suicide rates during the COVIDE-19 pandemic based on national and regional/local health statistics from across the world, however, provide a different picture. A majority of such comprehensive data-based studies report a modest reduction in total suicide rates whereas the remainder report no significant net increase in suicide rates during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (Behera et al., 2021; Deisenhammer and Kemmler, 2021; Ferrando et al., 2021; John et al., 2020; Kahil et al., 2021; Kim, 2021; Leske et al., 2021; Mitchell and Li, 2021; Nomura et al., 2021; Woolf et al., 2021). Whereas the net decline or no change in overall suicide rates was evident in the data presented in these reports, that observation was not mentioned in the abstract or conclusions of many of these articles. Additionally, occasional attention was drawn to real gender (Kim, 2021; Nomura et al., 2021) differences in suicide rates during the pandemic...
Language: en |