I would like to warn anybody reading, that this post considers trends in suicide. I appreciate that this is an incredibly difficult subject, and so just wanted to give the individual reading a chance to keep scrolling if they don't think that considering this subject would be good for their mental health today.
Okay, so interesting new research revealed a troubling trend in five different States when it came to adolescent suicide trends. In the research (Charpignon, Ontiveros, Sundaresan, 2022) partnerships were formed with 14 state departments, and data was collected between the years of 2015 to 2020. This resulted in the collection of data for 85102 decedents with suicide listed as the cause of death.
The researchers wanted to assess suicide trends in adolescents during the pandemic. Thus the authors compared prepandemic years with the pandemic years for ages 10-19.
The results showed something fairly troubling. In five States:
Georgia Indiana New Jersey Oklahoma Virginia
showed an increase in the absolute count of adolescent suicides. When the researchers compared this across 14 States, it was found that the proportion of overall suicides among adolescents increased during the pandemic.
In an article summarising the research, CNN Health also featured some really useful tips for spotting suicidal behaviour. These will be shown in the next post.
References:
Charpignon M, Ontiveros J, Sundaresan S, et al. Evaluation of Suicides Among US Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Pediatr. Published online April 25, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.0515
Suicide is such a hard topic to discuss. I don't know what are they going through, that they committed suicide. Proper counselling and medication can help it.
If we can take medicines easily for flu,so why can't we have mental illnesses without any taboo.
I hope, one day we live in a world, where there is no taboo around mental disorders.