study of mental/emotional impact of lockdowns

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posted by ramBRO

Massachusetts study finds no rise in suicides during pandemic lockdown.

[www.nytimes.com]

President Trump and other politicians have repeatedly warned that lockdowns and similar measures could cause at least as much distress as they prevent, in particular by increasing the risk of overdoses and suicides because of economic hardship. But the evidence for that claim is sparse; on Monday, a study posted on Medrxiv, a prepublication site, found that in Massachusetts, the suicide rate during the state’s lengthy stay-at-home advisory last spring remained steady, neither increasing nor decreasing.

The analysis is being submitted to a journal; it has not yet undergone peer review.

“This narrative that longer stay-at-home policies drive suicides doesn’t bear out,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the lead author of the study. “At least in a state that had a very long stay-at-home advisory, which, for all intents and purposes, was a shutdown. It was a ghost town here.”

Dr. Faust led a team of researchers from Harvard and Yale who compared suicide rates from March to May, when the state was largely shut down, with the rates during the same months in 2019, which were in line with previous years. The team adjusted for background trends (U.S. rates have been increasing steadily for many groups since at least 2008) and for the numbers of deaths still under investigation as possible suicides. The rate this spring was unchanged from previous years — just under one suicide a month per 100,000 people.

“Our data are reassuring that an increase in suicide deaths in Massachusetts during the stay-at-home advisory did not occur,” the authors concluded. “Moving forward, effective prevention efforts will require comprehensive attention to the full spectrum of mental health services.”

— Benedict Carey

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medRxiv: from [www.medrxiv.org]

Many believe that shelter-in-place or stay-at-home policies might cause an increase in so-called deaths of despair. While increases in psychiatric stressors during the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated, whether suicide rates changed during stay-at-home periods has not been described. This was an observational cohort study that assembled suicide death data for persons aged 10 years or older from the Massachusetts Department of Health Registry of Vital Records and Statistics from January 2015 through May 2020. Using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and seasonal ARIMA to analyze suicide deaths in Massachusetts, we compared the observed number of suicide deaths in Massachusetts during the stay-at-home period (March through May, 2020) in Massachusetts to the projected number of expected deaths. To be conservative, we also accounted for the deaths still pending final cause determination The incident rate for suicide deaths in Massachusetts was 0.67 per 100,000 person-month (95% CI 0.56-0.79) versus 0.81 per 100,000 person-month (95% CI 0.69-0.94) during the 2019 corresponding period (incident rate ratio of 0.83; 95% CI 0.66-1.03). The addition of the 57 deaths pending cause determination occurring from March through May 2020 and the 33 cases still pending determination from the 2019 corresponding period did not change these findings. The observed number of suicide deaths during the stay-at-home period did not deviate from ARIMA projected expectations using either preliminary data or an alternate scenario in which deaths pending investigation (exceeding the average remaining number of deaths still pending investigation which occurred during the corresponding 2015-2019 period) were ascribed to suicide. Decedent age and sex demographics were unchanged during the pandemic period compared to 2015-2019. The stable rates of suicide deaths during the stay-at-home advisory in Massachusetts parallel findings following ecological disasters. As the pandemic persists, uncertainty about its scope and economic impact may increase. However, our data are reassuring that an increase in suicide deaths in Massachusetts during the stay-at-home advisory period did not occur

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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.