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from Suicide rates during the pandemic remained unchanged. Here’s what we can learn from that.

Opinion by Jeremy Samuel Faust

[www.washingtonpost.com]
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Suicide rates in Massachusetts neither rose nor fell last spring. Suicide rates did not change from expected rates at all.

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No matter how we looked, we kept finding the same thing. Suicide rates did not budge during the stay-at-home advisory period (March 23 until a phased reopening began in late May) in Massachusetts, which had one of the longest such periods of any state in the nation.

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But government officials, the media and others need to remember that anecdotes and assumptions are not the same as robust public health data. Early in the pandemic, media reports — rumors, really — suggested that few covid-19 patients taking the drug remdesivir were dying. Earlier this month, data from actual studies showed that the drug has no effect on mortality. And then there were the president’s musings on the “miracle” drug hydroxychloroquine and other supposed solutions so deranged that they don’t warrant repeating.

Many well-informed and well-meaning people fell for the cognitive trap that if something rings true, it must be true — and thus assumed that suicide deaths were destined to rise during shutdowns. Certainly, more study on this subject is needed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported, “During late June, 40% of U.S. adults reported struggling with mental health or drug use,” with 1 in 4 people between the ages of 18 and 24 saying they had “seriously considered suicide” in the previous 30 days.

There are legitimate questions to be raised about the pandemic’s toll on mental health. Some of the impact may have more to do with the continuing inability to control the virus, and with the ensuing economic fallout, than with Americans’ staying home for weeks and even months in the spring. That said, a rise in suicides or other suffering resulting from temporary stay-home advisories is neither guaranteed nor inevitable.

To get this right, both now and in the future, we have to keep asking the right questions and awaiting the actual answers — and remember that the questions themselves, no matter how obvious their implications might seem, do not provide the answers. They remain what they are: questions.