There are frequent claims in the press & on social media about rising suicide rates. Which means a regular need to clarify: we don’t yet know the impact of Covid-19 & lockdown on the national suicide rate.

Why is this difficult? And what can we say so far?

/thread

Important to stress that if suicide rate goes up - or if it doesn’t - it’s in public interest for press to raise it & for public to know. But there’s also risk of causing distress to vulnerable people & a need to report responsibly.

And then there is the issue of evidence. /2

Not hard to see where risk may come from: anxiety, isolation, disruption to care, domestic violence. But support from family, services & community can help.

Even mental health impact of an economic downturn can be mitigated if we support people losing jobs or on benefits. /3

Measuring national suicide rate normally depends on inquests but these can take place months after a death, so cannot provide the immediate monitoring we need now. For that we have to set up something new, “real-time surveillance” - recording likely suicides as they occur. /4

Stories of rising suicide are often based on figures in one locality but this is not reliable. An area of 1 million people will see 10 suicides/month - each one tragic but in population terms small enough to be distorted by small reporting changes or random fluctuation. /5

Sometimes press quote individual deaths as evidence that figs are rising. But appalling truth is there are over 5000 suicides/yr in England, 100/week. Bereaved families tell us that as a society we are not facing up to scale of suicide & in a way these stories confirm that. /6

We should soon have robust evidence of suicide rates nationally but not yet - I don’t know any country that has. It does seem that for self-harm
•community rate hasn’t risen (UCL Covid social study)
•hospital attendances are down
•perhaps as a result, charities report more
/7

Meanwhile we should keep in mind:
•the distress that many are feeling
•the need to pre-empt suicide risk with support for most vulnerable
•that those headlines are at best speculative & unreliable
•the importance of evidence in a crisis - even more than usual

/ends