Suicide Deaths during the Stay-at-Home Advisory in Massachusetts.
Open accessPreprint — published as 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.34273
Abstract
Many believe that shelter-in-place or stay-at-home policies might cause an increase in so-called deaths of despair. While increases in psychiatric stressors during the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated, whether suicide rates changed during stay-at-home periods has not been described. This was an observational cohort study that assembled suicide death data for persons aged 10 years or older from the Massachusetts Department of Health Registry of Vital Records and Statistics from January 2015 through May 2020. Using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and seasonal ARIMA to analyze suicide deaths in Massachusetts, we compared the observed number of suicide deaths in Massachusetts during the stay-at-home period (March through May, 2020) in Massachusetts to the projected number of expected deaths. To be conservative, we also accounted for the deaths still pending final cause determination The incident rate for suicide deaths in Massachusetts was 0.67 per 100,000 person-month (95% CI 0.56-0.79) versus 0.81 per 100,000 person-month (95% CI 0.69-0.94) during the 2019 corresponding period (incident rate ratio of 0.83; 95% CI 0.66-1.03). The addition of the 57 deaths pending cause determination occurring from March through May 2020 and the 33 cases still pending determination from the 2019 corresponding period did not change these findings. The observed number of suicide deaths during the stay-at-home period did not deviate from ARIMA projected expectations using either preliminary data or an alternate scenario in which deaths pending investigation (exceeding the average remaining number of deaths still pending investigation which occurred during the corresponding 2015-2019 period) were ascribed to suicide. Decedent age and sex demographics were unchanged during the pandemic period compared to 2015-2019. The stable rates of suicide deaths during the stay-at-home advisory in Massachusetts parallel findings following ecological disasters. As the pandemic persists, uncertainty about its scope and economic impact may increase. However, our data are reassuring that an increase in suicide deaths in Massachusetts during the stay-at-home advisory period did not occur.
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Four of the 13 studies published since the search use appropriate time-series modelling approaches to control for underlying trends and report either no change or a fall in suicide deaths in the early months of the pandemic.
“Four of these use appropriate time-series modelling approaches to control for underlying trends ( Leske et al., 2021, Australia; Faust et al., 2020, USA; Vandoros et al., 2020, Greece; Ando et al., 2020, Japan) – these report either no change or a fall in suicide deaths in the early months of the pandemic, although in keeping with Tanaka & Okamoto (2020); Tanaka & Okamoto (2021) and Ueda et al.’s”
From The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-harm and suicidal behaviour: update of living systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as Faust et al., 2020
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Cites
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“21 The Peruvian study reported a decrease in suicides following stay-at-home orders.”
BackgroundResultSelf-citationIncrease in suicide following an initial decline during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan
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“Data from the Massachusetts Department of Health Registry of Vital Records and Statistics demonstrate that deaths by suicide did not deviate from expected rates in March through May of 2020, when the stay-at-home advisory was in effect (Faust et al., 2020).”
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“While another recent Massachusetts-based study suggests that overall suicide rates did not increase during the pandemic, it appears that the experience of suicidal ideation may have increased at certain time points following the outbreak [13].”
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“Research shows that [45], coping strategies such as leisure time, work, exercising, and sleeping had a mediating effect increasing resilience and decreasing stress and distress; on the other hand, resilience directly negatively affects suicidal ideation [46,47].”
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Assessing the Optimality of a COVID Lockdown in the United States
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“Faust et al. (2020) study records from the Massachusetts Department of Health Registry of Vital Records and Statistics from January 2015 through May 2020 and find that suicide rates have actually decreased to 0.”
BackgroundInfluentialMokhtari, A. K., Maurer, L. R., Dezube, M., Langeveld, K., Wong, Y. M., Hardman, C., Hafiz, S., Sharrah, M. L., Soe-Lin, H., Chapple, K. M., et al. (2022) · Injury · doi:10.1016/j.injury.2022.02.034 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
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Impact of the lockdown by the COVID-19 pandemic on suicidal trend in the Colombian Coffee Region
Franco-Ramírez, J. D., Agudelo-Mejia, K., Medina-Osorio, J. C., Gómez, G. A., & Londoño, J. F. (2023) · Heliyon · doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17856 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Could the United States Benefit from a Lockdown? A Cost-Benefit AnalysisPreprint
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“Faust et al. (2020) study records from the Massachusetts Department of Health Registry of Vital Records and Statistics from January 2015 through May 2020 and find that suicide rates have actually decreased to 0.67 per 100,000 person-months from 0.81 per 100,000 person-months during the same period…”
BackgroundInfluential
- Authors
- Faust, J. S., Shah, S. B., Du, C., Li, S.-X., Lin, Z., & Krumholz, H. M.
- Affiliations
- Brigham and Women's Hospital (US)
- Yale New Haven Hospital (US)
- Corresponding author
- Faust, Jeremy S.
- Venue
- JAMA Network Open
- Publisher
- openRxiv
- Published
- 2020-10-20
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- e2034273-e2034273
- ISSN
- 2574-3805 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7821026
- OpenAlex
- W3125075124
- Cited by
- 98
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 39 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 15.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- JAMA Network Open (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- medRxiv (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Shenzhen Center for Health Information
- National Institutes of Health (UL1TR001863)
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Suicide and Self-Harm Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › COVID-19 and Mental Health
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Modeling and Simulation › COVID-19 epidemiological studies
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home orders, suicide mortality, pandemic public health measures, mental health, Massachusetts
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, Adolescent, Adult, Age Factors, Female, Humans, Loneliness, Massachusetts, Social Isolation, Suicide, Cohort Studies, Suicidal Ideation
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