Citation

Lee JI, Hsu WY, Huang CL, Chang SS, Shaw FFT, Yu HT, Yang LX. Asian J. Psychiatry 2022; 80: e103361.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2022.103361

PMID

36462394

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is having mental health consequences for many people, the relationships between the pandemic and suicide risk is still unclear. Some studies revealed an increase in suicide mortality rate during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Devitt, 2020), while others found no change or even a decrease (e.g., Pirkis et al., 2021). In this study, we addressed this concern via directly assessing the levels of suicide risk and emotional disturbance of the callers of Taiwan National Suicide Prevention Hotline (NSPH). To understand the influence of the pandemic on the callers, we compared the data of two equivalent groups: the pre-COVID-19 group (N = 108, 2013–2018) and the COVID-19 group (N = 108, February-May, 2020).

The suicide risk of each caller was assessed with a 9-option scale (5 of them reflecting the levels of suicide risk) by two well-trained raters according to what s/he said on the phone. The inter-rater reliability was pretty high (kappa
= 0.89 , p < 0.01). In order to assess the emotional disturbance of each caller, we conducted text analysis with LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry of Word Count; Pennebaker et al., 2015) for the transcript transferred from her/his narrative on the phone. LIWC comprises a dictionary which defines common words as about 71 psychological-linguistic categories and an application which is used to recode the words in a text to the percentages of LIWC word categories. In this study, we focused on 7 LIWC word categories which are evident to be the markers for depression or anxiety (see Shen and Rudzicz, 2017; Sonnenschein et al., 2018), namely First-person-singular pronoun (I), Negative emotions, Positive emotions, Sadness, Discrepancy, Health, and Anxiety. As people in Taiwan normally speak Chinese, the transcripts were processed by C-LIWC (Lin et al., 2020), the Chinese version of LIWC. This research has received approval from the Human Research Institutional Review Board (IRB) from National Chengchi University Research Ethics Center, Taipei Lifeline Association (TLA) and Taiwan Ministry of Health and Welfare to obtain the data.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Depression; Anxiety; COVID-19; Chinese LIWC; Suicide hotline