ArticleThe Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry2023
What happened to the predicted COVID-19-induced suicide epidemic, and why?
Article in The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Understanding Canadian experiences of suicidality during the COVID-19 pandemic: protocol of a pan-Canadian qualitative study.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Mental health impacts of COVID-19: A retrospective analysis of dynamic modelling projections for Australia.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Unpeeling the onion: Digital triage and monitoring of general practice, private psychiatry, and psychology.Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists · 2024Article
- Generational differences in mental health trends in the twenty-first century.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Two years ago, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were widespread and grim predictions of an ensuing suicide epidemic. Not only has this not happened but also by the end of 2021 in the majority of countries and regions with available data, the suicide rates had, if anything, declined. We discuss four reasons why the predictions of suicide models were exaggerated: (1) government intervention reduced the economic and mental costs of lockdowns, (2) the pandemic itself and lockdowns had less of an effect on mental health than assumed, (3) the evidence for a link between economic downturns, distress and suicide is weaker and less consistent than the models assumed and (4) predicting suicide is generally hard. Predictive models have an important place, but their strong modelling assumptions need to acknowledge the inherent high degree of uncertainty which has been further augmented by behavioural responses of pandemic management.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.