Suicide Mortality and Coronavirus Disease 2019-A Perfect Storm?

By M. Reger, Ian H. Stanley, T. Joiner. JAMA psychiatry, 2020

850 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Suicide rates have been rising in the US over the last 2 decades. The latest data available (2018) show the highest age-adjusted suicide rate in the US since 1941.1 It is within this context that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) struck the US. Concerning disease models have led to historic and unprecedented public health actions to curb the spread of the virus. Remarkable social distancing interventions have been implemented to fundamentally reduce human contact. While these steps are expected to reduce the rate of new infections, the potential for adverse outcomes on suicide risk is high. Actions could be taken to mitigate potential unintended consequences on suicide prevention efforts, which also represent a national public health priority.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06b793ba98018e46ac1284676ff0a83fea0b09db

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Citations in the corpus

Emotional distress in young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence of risk and resilience from a longitudinal cohort study (2020, background): “…associated lockdown – which include uncertainty, ambiguity, loss of control, social isolation, and worries about one ’ s own health and that of loved ones – could induce or increase stress and stress-related mental health problems, including internalizing symptoms and anger (Reger et al., 2020).”
Suicide Ideation Detection via Social and Temporal User Representations using Hyperbolic Learning (2021, background): “Consequently, a growing body of work has shown that natural language processing can complement social media analysis to identify risk markers in online user behavior to aid suicide risk assessment (McCarthy, 2010; De Choudhury et al., 2016; Reger et al., 2020; Shing et al., 2018).”
Psychological Impact of COVID-19 and Lockdown among University Students in Malaysia: Implications and Policy Recommendations (2020, background): “It is a hostile experience that can cause severe financial stress [40,41] due to loss of employment; social disorders such as social withdrawal, cyberbullying, alcohol misuse, and addiction; and mental health issues such as suicide attempts and depression [42,43].”