Citation

Marutani T, Fuse-Nagase Y, Tachikawa H, Iwami T, Yamamoto Y, Moriyama T, Yasumi K. Asian J. Psychiatry 2021; 65: e102803.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2021.102803

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused university students in Japan to be locked out from their campuses and for stay-at-home orders to be issued (Nomura et al., 2021a). The then Prime Minister declared the first state of emergency in April 2020. Thus, all classes and seminars at their laboratory launched online from the beginning of the academic year in April or from the very first day for the first-year students. However, a survey conducted at a university in central Japan reported that new students' anxiety and depression levels were lower in April-May 2020 compared to the previous year, with academic distress being higher (Horita et al., 2021). This unexpected result might be because they were not stressed about building interpersonal relationships in a new environment. In a survey conducted in May-June 2020 at a university in northern Japan, 13 % of students showed moderate or severe depression, and 6.7 % showed suicide-related ideation (Nomura et al., 2021a). According to a nationwide survey in France, 11.4 % of university students had suicidal thoughts under confined measures (Wathelet et al., 2020). There seems to be a certain risk that stay-at-home situations may induce suicidal thoughts in students. Among the general population in Japan, the number of suicides increased by 4.5 % in 2020 compared to 2019--the first increase in 11 years--primarily influenced by the rise among women and young people in...

Language: en