Pandemic’s effect on already rising suicide rates heightens worry

Economic and social pressures brought on by COVID-19 lead to elevated risk

By Sandhya Raman of Roll Call. Excerpts:

"Los Alamos has seen an increase in suicides during the pandemic, rising from just two last year to triple that many so far this year. 

The problem isn’t limited to that community. Cook County, Illinois, and Fresno, California, are among those reporting similar spikes, with suicides up 13 percent in Cook County so far compared with the same period last year. In Fresno, suicides were 70 percent higher in June than in the same month last year.

The nation’s suicide rate reached historic highs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with rates at the highest levels since World War II. Economic and social pressures this year have heightened the risks, worrying experts, health officials and lawmakers.

Suicide mortality rates that were rising over the past two decades combined with the current pandemic are a “perfect storm,” found a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April. Factors include economic stress, social isolation, reduced access to religious services, overall national anxiety, increased firearm sales and increases in health care provider suicides.

“We have people now who don’t know how to feed their family who have not had that thought for a very long time. That’s different than the last recession,” said American Psychiatric Association President Jeffrey Geller. “There are masses of people who are quite worried today because they don’t know what is going to happen to their benefits. That kind of anxiety exacerbates fragility.”

The National Alliance on Mental Illness HelpLine has seen a 65 percent increase in calls and emails since March, according to the organization, though it is not a crisis hotline.

It’s still early for government data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but some experts point to similar rises in suicide deaths during other health crises and economic recessions. Suicide increased in the United States during the influenza pandemic in 1918-19 and in 2003 in older populations in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic.

A 2019 study in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry looking at the 2008 economic crisis found that financial crises can lead to more suicides.

“Suicide is likely to become a more pressing concern as the pandemic spreads and has longer-term effects on the general population, the economy, and vulnerable groups. Preventing suicide therefore needs urgent consideration,” wrote University of Bristol suicidology expert David J. Gunnell in the June issue of The Lancet. “The pandemic will cause distress and leave many people vulnerable to mental health problems and suicidal behaviour. Mental health consequences are likely to be present for longer and peak later than the actual pandemic.” 

CDC Director Robert Redfield also commented in July on a spike in suicides.

“There has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose,” said Redfield."

"Julie Cerel, director of the Suicide Prevention and Exposure Laboratory at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work  . . . said economic disadvantages, especially unemployment, can substantially contribute to suicide, as can social isolation, but other factors are also at play.

“Suicide tends to decrease in times of local or national emergency because people have that pull-together mentality,” she said, citing a drop in suicides in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Suicides in the state did begin to spike two years later.

American Association of Suicidology President Jonathan Singer uses an analogy: that everyone is weathering the same storm in different boats.

If evictions start to ramp up, “we’re going to see that people are in different boats in the same storm and some of those boats are going to sink,” said Singer. “I think we’re going to see a rise in suicide rates.”"

"The spike in suicides in Cook County is especially pronounced in the Black community, which has already seen 58 suicides this year, according to the medical examiner’s office. That outpaces 56 from all of 2019 and 33 during the same time period last year.

Suicide rates among young Americans and people of color were rising even before the pandemic. CDC data found that among Black children nationally, the rate jumped from 2.55 suicides per 100,000 children in 2007 to 4.82 per 100,000 in 2017.

In June, Fresno reported 17 suicide deaths in one month, the highest number in almost three years and up from 10 in June 2019. 

Ahmadreza Bahrami, division manager of public behavioral health at the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health, also reported increases in calls to crisis hotlines.

The long-term effects of the pandemic on the suicide rate are less clear.

“We already had a suicide problem, but the compounding of that suicide problem isn’t going to go away even when we have a vaccine,” said Geller."