A year's worth of suicide attempts
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I believe people's thinking about Covid and what to do about it is informed by self-interest and group-think foremost. "What's best for society", however one defines that, isn't really part of the picture, even if everybody swears up and down that it totally is. It's been interesting to watch the group-think enforced by the relentless framing of the debate as sane vs crazy, smart vs stupid. I don't need to tell anybody which side is which in our current cultural narrative.
@Horace said in A year's worth of suicide attempts:
I believe people's thinking about Covid and what to do about it is informed by self-interest and group-think foremost. "What's best for society", however one defines that, isn't really part of the picture, even if everybody swears up and down that it totally is. It's been interesting to watch the group-think enforced by the relentless framing of the debate as sane vs crazy, smart vs stupid. I don't need to tell anybody which side is which in our current cultural narrative.
It is curious to me that the narrative around science rarely talks about %’s and real risk factors that a person can relate to. It’s always raw numbers and then of course the young people but without what %. I’d like to make my own assessment of what % chance I have of going bankrupt and not having a career and family to provide for vs % chance of dying if I venture out.
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Young healthy folk who are losing by this shut down have every reason to believe they are sacrificing of themselves for others. But they're just expected to do it without so much as a thank you because it's the only sane and smart option. So says the narrative.
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Young healthy folk who are losing by this shut down have every reason to believe they are sacrificing of themselves for others. But they're just expected to do it without so much as a thank you because it's the only sane and smart option. So says the narrative.
@Horace said in A year's worth of suicide attempts:
Young healthy folk who are losing by this shut down have every reason to believe they are sacrificing of themselves for others. But they're just expected to do it without so much as a thank you because it's the only sane and smart option.
It will be good practice for parenthood.
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Based on Fauci’s recent comments I think he looked at the science behind the economics of the shutdown and went “oh shit”.
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If having to stay in the house is all it takes to make you want to kill yourself, you've got bigger problems than just being depressed.
We live in a world filled with pussy men. Our ancestors had to worry about their kid getting sent off to war. Now all it takes to scare one of these pussy men is to tell him he has to stay at home and play video games..
We need to thin the herd.
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In the CDC’s worst case scenario if you are under 50 statistically you have a 99.9% chance of surviving Covid infection. We have completely upended people’s livelihood and lifestyles and forced them to rewrite their future prospects.
Now why would we think we would have mental health concerns. I mean I would rather stay home as a millennial if there was a .01% chance of dying because that’s what they taught me on TV and in college.
@Loki said in A year's worth of suicide attempts:
We have completely upended people’s livelihood and lifestyles and forced them to rewrite their future prospects.
Who’s ‘we’? You got a virus in your pocket?
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@Loki said in A year's worth of suicide attempts:
We have completely upended people’s livelihood and lifestyles and forced them to rewrite their future prospects.
Who’s ‘we’? You got a virus in your pocket?
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You know, lack of access to worship has a big part to do with this, I'm sure that @Jolly would agree.
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You know, lack of access to worship has a big part to do with this, I'm sure that @Jolly would agree.
@LuFins-Dad said in A year's worth of suicide attempts:
You know, lack of access to worship has a big part to do with this, I'm sure that @Jolly would agree.
Lack of access to social routines generally, I'm sure. Which is only part of the reason why I'm not into "lockdown at any cost."
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"I mean, we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks," Dr. Mike deBoisblanc, head of trauma at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC7 on Thursday. "We've never seen numbers like this in such a short period of time..."
But in an interview with BuzzFeed News, deBoisblanc said his comment about the hospital seeing "a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks" was inaccurate. He added that at the time he didn't know what the true numbers were. Many of his other comments, which compared the number of deaths from COVID-19 to suicides, "were taken a bit out of context," he said.
Numbers provided by the hospital and the coroner's office also show that the "sharp rise" in suicides initially claimed by deBoisblanc, which alarmed political pundits criticizing quarantine orders, were either overblown or outright false. According to the hospital, it has seen five suicide deaths during the county's shelter-in-place order, compared to two suicide deaths during the same period last year. In general, Contra Costa County sees about 100 suicide deaths per year, and officials said that that's remained stable so far in 2020.
"If you look at it from a contextual standpoint, I think it's accurate," deBoisblanc told BuzzFeed News when asked whether the number of suicide attempts treated at the hospital was actually unprecedented. "If you contextualize in concrete numbers fashion, it's not accurate."
The original news story about a "spike" in suicides did not cite any data nor point to any numbers indicating an alarming trend.
"Unfortunately, we have the data to prove it," deBoisblanc told ABC7, talking about the impact stay-at-home orders have had on mental health. When he later spoke to BuzzFeed News, he admitted that there was no data directly linking the suicide attempts seen at the hospital to the lockdowns.
According to a statement released by the hospital, staff did see a slight increase in self-inflicted injuries between March 1 and May 8, with 13 incidents reported this year (compared to eight during the same time period last year).
The hospital has also seen one more suicide case than deaths from COVID-19, but deBoisblanc told BuzzFeed News the difference didn't point to a trend, nor did it illustrate the toll the pandemic has taken on the community's mental health.
John Muir Medical Center is Contra Costa's trauma center, meaning emergency injuries and trauma, such as many suicide attempts, from all over the county with 1.1 million residents are most likely directed there. COVID-19 cases, on the other hand, have been more evenly distributed across all of the county's hospitals, a move medical officials took at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent overwhelming a single facility.
"We're the county's trauma center, so [our numbers] are skewed," deBoisblanc told BuzzFeed News.
In fact, according to the Contra Costa County Coroner's Office, the number of suicides recorded in the Northern California county has remained relatively stable.
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Suicides or attempted suicides, choose a metric.
I’m not saying that the numbers are up or down and the first article was surprisingly lacking in actual numbers. But this second article refuted the first with stats that are irrelevant to the original. I would still like to see those numbers.
By the way, I would think that a doubling of suicides over the same period is of statistical importance...
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Colorado suicides down 40% during first two months of pandemic.
Though calls to crisis centers rose.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/13/cdc-mental-health-pandemic-394832
CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic
One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation's mental health during the crisis.
The data also flags a surge of anxiety and substance abuse, with more than 40 percent of those surveyed saying they experienced a mental or behavioral health condition connected to the Covid-19 emergency. The CDC study analyzed 5,412 survey respondents between June 24 and 30.
The toll is falling heaviest on young adults, caregivers, essential workers and minorities. While 10.7 percent of respondents overall reported considering suicide in the previous 30 days, 25.5 percent of those between 18 to 24 reported doing so. Almost 31 percent of self-reported unpaid caregivers and 22 percent of essential workers also said they harbored such thoughts. Hispanic and Black respondents similarly were well above the average.
Roughly 30.9 percent of respondents said they had symptoms of anxiety or depression. Roughly 26.3 respondents reported trauma and stress-related disorder because of the pandemic.
