COVID-19 outbreak ever since its onset and subsequent global spread had created several challenges for the general public and the health care workers across the World. COVID-19 pandemic is projected to lead to a significant degree of mental health crisis across the globe and therefore, the World Health Organization (WHO) had published brief messages/notes related to mental health and psychological considerations during COVID-19 outbreak and had highlighted the importance of psychological first aid (World Health Organisation, 2020). The growing concern of the general public regarding the spread of infection from suspected COVID-19 positive individuals has created a panic mode in the community. While this will help in limiting the growing number of cases of COVID-19, this has also led to significant fear and anxiety related to spread of infection in the general public. Excessive fear and apprehension of spread of infection can lead to acute stress, anxiety, and subsyndromal to syndromal level of depression in vulnerable individuals. The National centre for Suicide Research and Prevention of Mental Ill-health (NASP) is already attempting to increase awareness about the potential increase in suicide and self-harm behavior as a result of the societal impact of the ongoing pandemic (“The Corona Virus, ” n.d.). Possible potential risk factors such as prolonged periods of social isolation, fear of unemployment, economic loss due to lockdown, death of family members and significant others etc. have been proposed to precipitate self-harm behaviors during this pandemic crisis (“The Corona Virus, ” n.d.) There have been reports of suicide due to excessive fear of contracting COVID-19 from India as early as 12th February,2020, even when the infection was not spread across the country (Goyal et al., 2020). Further, there have been isolated reports in the newspapers/bulletin of suicide due to alcohol ban during the lockdown period from different parts of India (M.K, 2020; Pathak, 2020). Here we present two different presentations of self-harm attempts related to apprehension of developing COVID-19, who presented to our emergency medical services.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 1876-2018 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102104 ID - ref1 ER -