1 through March 4) a peak pandemic/lockdown period (March 5 through May 7) and a progressive reopening period (May 8 through July 7). 1 through July 7, 2020, dividing data into three subperiods: a pre-COVID-19 period (Jan. Investigators studied suicide death information from Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner from Jan. It’s possible that other populations hit hard by COVID-19 - such as the Latino community, single mothers balancing work and child care, and older residents - may also have suffered greater distress as marked by suicide, though his dataset was too limited to make those determinations. Black Marylanders were much more severely affected by the pandemic in terms of both infection rate and fatalities, he says. “This is obviously concerning, and it serves as a reminder that when we aggregate all of our data - thinking the population is homogeneous - we miss especially vulnerable populations,” says Nestadt, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Anxiety Disorders Clinic. These results were published as a research letter in JAMA Psychiatry. However, once investigators studied suicide deaths by race, they found that suicides among white residents decreased by 45% during early March to early May, while suicides among Black residents increased by 94% in the same time frame. Instead of a peak in suicides during the lockdown of spring 2020, the investigation found an overall decrease in suicides compared with the previous three years’ numbers. ![]() ![]() After all, spikes in suicide rates were documented during the 18 flu pandemics, as well as among the elderly in Hong Kong after the 2003 SARS outbreak.Ī recent study directed by Nestadt analyzing suicides among Maryland residents during the first six months of the year yielded some surprising findings. Early in the pandemic, there were worries among mental health professionals that COVID-19’s impacts on people’s isolation, stress and finances - coupled with Americans’ unprecedented purchases of guns - would create a perfect storm toward a surge of suicides, says psychiatrist Paul Nestadt.
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