Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Stats

America's Suicide Rate Declined in 2020 - Despite Lockdowns (cbsnews.com) 126

CBS News reports: The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic — the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data. Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.

It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested. "There's a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we're banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we're in this together," said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic." An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation's suicide problem may have also contributed, she said.

U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts. The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015.

MarketWatch also points out that in the U.S. in 2020, "Total deaths increased by 17.7% year over year, the provisional estimates showed.

"COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, while suicide dropped from the country's 10th leading cause of death to the 11th.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

America's Suicide Rate Declined in 2020 - Despite Lockdowns

Comments Filter:
  • Curses! (Score:2, Funny)

    by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

    Foiled again

  • The number of guns sold also has been going up. So not really a coincidence. The heroism phase of the pandemic is probably a good and accurate supposition for the drop. Once this is over, expect the rate to go back to where it was and keep rising.
    • by nucrash ( 549705 )

      Sure, the number if firearms is up, but ammunition has been in short supply. Perhaps the answer is what Chris Rock said all along, drive the cost of each bullet up to $5000 and watch murder/suicide drop.

      https://www.gunsandammo.com/ed... [gunsandammo.com]

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        > Perhaps the answer is what Chris Rock said all along, drive the cost of each bullet up to $5000 and watch murder/suicide drop.

        So instead of people killing themselves, you have people walking around wishing they were dead.

        All we need now is "Mission Accomplished" banner and a presidential speech on an aircraft carrier and I'm sold.

        • by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @01:49PM (#61259124)

          So instead of people killing themselves, you have people walking around wishing they were dead.

          I knew a girl in high school who was driving with her two younger siblings in the car and was hit head on by someone trying to suicide. I wish someone had given the asshole a gun. And stop calling that "gun violence" since it can be worse without the gun.

      • by uncqual ( 836337 )

        It's true that ammunition has been in short supply but if you need more than one round to commit suicide you're doing something horribly wrong.

        It hasn't been that hard to get ammunition at some price and, seriously, after using one round from the very expensive box you bought, you leave your heirs 49 rounds of valuable ammunition so it's an investment you pass on...

      • This is what I've been saying all year. You don't need to be concerned with the number of guns being sold. You need to be more concerned with all the ammunition that people are stock piling. People are buying cans of 10K of .223 rounds. Outside of a military uprising I can only think of a few reasons to have that much .223 ammo. Maybe hog shooting in Texas.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @01:11PM (#61259000)
      and it's more likely a general slowing of the pace of life [arstechnica.com]. e.g. people aren't going to work & school and forcing themselves through miserable experiences to earn money or prepare to earn money. Stimulus payments and eviction moratoriums also likely have an effect.

      Basically we reduced the key stressors that make people kill themselves.
    • Makes sense. Don't you know that happiness is a warm gun?
  • by Invisible Now ( 525401 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @11:44AM (#61258700)

    Could the rise in single car accident deaths be misclassified as accidental and actually mask a hidden number of suicides?

    • Possible, but its possible that high road speeds overbalanced the fewer traffic miles. There were also a lot of people who were out of practice from driving infrequently. There is probably data on the type of accidents and speeds. You would expect auto suicides to be very high speed crashes into solid objects, with the driver not wearing seat belts. That should show up in the statistics if its there.
    • by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @11:59AM (#61258760)
      I don't know how things were in your area, but in my major US city, it was like GTA out on the highways when the pandemic first hit. The lower levels of traffic and policing led to some seriously reckless driving. I drive like an old lady, and decided that it was better to just take surface streets than dealing with the maniacs on the highway.
      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        DUIs. They never shut down the pot shops and cocktail lounges through the pandemic. People are not working and don't have a boss to answer to for being sh*t-faced.

      • I don't drive like an old lady, but I'm not a nut. I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle, maybe leaning towards cautious. I live in a rural area and can't say I've noticed too much difference but the one thing that happened just recently really got to me.

        I was on a two-lane and there was a car in front of me going a bit more slowly, but not frustratingly slow. So I hung back a reasonable distance and just followed along, knowing that a passing lane would open up. There are also turn-outs, which in

        • Stuck between the bully and the slow driver. I will often withdraw and let them handle it between them. It helps that I consider myself the better driver.

          • This works great if you've got two full lanes to work with. I've done that and watched the pointless tussle in a high-speed pack play out ahead of me, theater of the absurd.

            In my one lane with a turn-out scenario, I suppose I could have taken the hit, broke hard and stopped in the short turn-out and let it all go by. Maybe I would have come away in a better mood.

    • insurance companies relentlessly investigate those to avoid paying out. If people were faking suicides in car accidents then they'd be finding that out because they have a strong financial incentive to do so.
      • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        Step 1: acknowledge people/companies are motived by financial incentives when it fits your narrative
        Step 2: disregard everything from step 1 when the government pays the state for COVID cases/deaths and assume the numbers are legit

        www.fark.com/politics -- yup

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        What would they be paying for?

        If it's a single car accident then the insured vehicle is destroyed but the policy holder is now dead and unlikely to claim on it. If a guy drives his car off a bridge, or into a tree at high speed the only affected party is dead, and the cops will clean up the resulting mess.

        They would investigate on a life insurance claim, but many people don't have life insurance.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
      Yes, the rise in single car accidents would indicate that the single-car-suicides are misclassified. This has been reported for decades.
      The issues for actual knowing is the lack of evidence of suicide notes in some cases.

      While this articles reports that suicides are down, other reports say sucides are UP. Who do you believe? Which reporting group has the strongest motivation to lie, that is, misreport or mis-classify the deaths. Personally, the source for this post is thoroughly lacking when other
      • Wouldn't later, larger datasets provide a better picture of what happened during the last 14 months? Do you have data to refute this bullshit?
      • I came to this thread fully expecting the QAnon Contingent to be well represented here, and they did not disappoint.

      • Yes, the rise in single car accidents would indicate that the single-car-suicides are misclassified. This has been reported for decades.

        Possibly, but reckless driving has also been on the increase.

        And besides, I'm not persuaded that the pandemic caused a massive shift in non-vehicular to vehicular suicide methods (as would be required to explain the data).

        One thing that is universally reported is that suicides of K-12 children has risen sharply. So maybe the overall has gone done but the "For The Children" demographics has gone UP -- that is, children are committing suicide and noticeably higher numbers.

        Is it?

        I looked, and there's clusters as always, but I had trouble finding people mentioning the sharp rise you spoke of, much less universal reporting of it. In fact, the best resource I found mentioned only "the National Child Mortality Database has identified a concerning signal that dea [bmj.com]

      • ... While this articles reports that suicides are down, other reports say sucides are UP. Who do you believe? Which reporting group has the strongest motivation to lie, that is, misreport or mis-classify the deaths. Personally, the source for this post is thoroughly lacking when other sources came out previously and on the opposite side of the argument.!

        Reports? I've seen a number of people saying suicides are up but I don't think any of the ones I saw actually had any reports with factual data. The article links to an actual report on the Journal of American Medicine Association. What have you got?

  • Age Brackets (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday April 10, 2021 @11:48AM (#61258722) Homepage Journal

    Mental health people have been saying teen suicide was up 150%.

    Are many of the normal suicides elderly people who are at the end of their healthspan? Because lots of them got wiped out by the virus.

    A single scalar can't tell a useful story.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Agreed. One of my wife's best friends deals with people (primarily teens to early 20's) with mental health issues. She's said many times that this group of people has had a really hard time with isolation and social distancing leading to an increase in suicides and attempted suicides. As this is her job I'm more prone to believe her and her resources over CBS. But I also tend to trust JAMA and follow them closely. Maybe there is an increase in certain regions but overall it's down? Dunno...

      Something seems o

      • AFAIK Japan showed a decline in half of 2020 but then a great increase when the second wave of covid struck the country, perhaps that effect is just delayed in the US? Also this bit from TFA "The CDC has not yet reported national suicide rates for 2020, nor has it provided a breakdown of suicides by state, age or race and ethnicity." so it seems that the report is not for the full year of 2020 yet?!
    • Teen suicides (and moreso the number of teens considered at-risk) are what scare the living shit out of me. Even among kids that have maintained reasonable normalcy to their lives there is just this air of abstraction and a disconnect with people that I hadn’t noticed before.

      But, at the same time I’ve seen a number of kids that are excelling and really growing with covid. There might be a wealth gap between the two groups that would explain away much of it, but there is more to it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Under 25 makes a a small percentage of suicides. Middle age make up the highest percentage young people have been viciously torn from their developmental social structures, with limited maturity, so it makes sense that more of them with limited social skills off themselves. For most older adults, the pandemic has not been so bad. If you were ok before, and you kept your job, it was just a shift. The US government has increased benefits, ended evictions, prevented cancelation of insurance. And yes more pe
    • Re:Age Brackets (Score:5, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @08:15PM (#61259896)
      Figure 2 - Suicide Rate by Age (per 100,000) [nih.gov]
      • 10-14: female 2.0, male 3.7
      • 15-24: F 5.8, M 22.7
      • 25-44: F 7.9, M 27.7
      • 45-64: F 9.8, M 31.0
      • 65-74: F 6.2, M 27.8
      • 75+: F 4.0, M 39.9

      (Go click on the link and find the figure - it presents the numbers in graphical format.) So yes the elderly (especially males) have a higher rate of suicide. I was unable to find the raw 2020 data on the CDC site to compare by age group. Will be interesting to see that when it comes out.

    • Mental health people have been saying teen suicide was up 150%.

      Citation Needed.

  • Gender Breakdown (Score:4, Interesting)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @12:03PM (#61258770)
    It would have been nice if they provided a gender breakdown of the stats. Prior to 2020, men in the US were committing suicide at a rate 3 to 4 times that of women. So was this decrease in 2020 spread equally across both genders or did it impact one more than the other?
  • anyway, what I really want to know is what the divorce rate will be after so much tire wear on relationships from the last 12 months of being cooped up will be...

  • ... to be more chill. That sure helps.

  • “He jumped out of a window!”
    “Gravity is natural.”
    “I’ll just put down Covid-19.”

  • Who aren't killing themselves now because the lockdown is making life easier for them.

  • If I remember correctly (and I have to admit that my memory of the numbers is vague), they counted people who attempted suicide, but who also had COVID, as having died of COVID.
  • impossible, we had many "experts" on slashdot telling us the Pandemic lockdown was causing MORE deaths through suicide than covid was killing.
  • All those stimulus checks and unemployment was a big help for people with depression. It isn't technically a UBI but in most studies, people who got a UBI felt less stressed. That's what I think is happening here.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      "all those stimulus checks"??? There were two, although the second was so late in the year it couldn't have changed the stats. And unemployment compensation? That has nothing to do with UBI; I'm sure most people would've preferred to be working.
      • It's not a UBI but it is money from the government like a UBI would work. While I'm sure most people would have preferred to work, I'm sure those same people would also be happier to receive some money. This helps you when times are tough, like when you're between jobs or determining if this job is for you. Extra spending cash to buy something you've wanted or pay bills.

  • It's going to the office that makes people suicidal. Not to mention murderous.

  • I was in the camp which predicted suicides would spike in 2020. I hope this result holds up and that I was dead wrong.

    I predicted increased domestic violence and divorces. I hope I'm wrong about that too.

  • Surely if the suicide rate declines you might conclude that either the suicidal are being killed by Covid instead.... OR, the reason for depression and suicide is something to do with 'normal life'? Possibly the pressure, the poor work-life balance. All of which were suddenly mitigated by working from home?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

In practice, failures in system development, like unemployment in Russia, happens a lot despite official propaganda to the contrary. -- Paul Licker

Working...