Psychosocial and pandemic-related circumstances of suicide deaths in 2020: Evidence from the National Violent Death Reporting System.

Purpose: To describe and explore variation in 'pandemic-related circumstances' among suicide decedents during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: We identified pandemic-related circumstances using decedents' text narratives in the 2020 National Violent Death Reporting System. We use time-series analysis to compare other psychosocial characteristics (e.g., mental health history, interpersonal difficulties, financial strain) of decedents pre-pandemic (2017/2018: n = 56,968 suicide and n = 7,551 undetermined deaths) to those in 2020 (n = 31,887 suicide and n = 4,100 undetermined). We characterize common themes in the narratives with pandemic-related circumstances using topic modeling, and explore variation in topics by age and other psychosocial circumstances.
Results: In 2020, n = 2,502 (6.98%) narratives described pandemic-related circumstances. Compared to other deaths in 2020 and to the pre-pandemic period, decedents with pandemic-related circumstances were older and more highly educated. Common themes of pandemic-related circumstances narratives included: concerns about shutdown restrictions, financial losses, and infection risk. Relative to decedents of the same age that did not have pandemic-related circumstances in 2020, those with pandemic-related circumstances were more likely to also have financial (e.g., for 25-44 years, 43% vs. 12%) and mental health (76% vs. 66%) psychosocial circumstances, but had similar or lower prevalence of substance abuse (47% vs. 49%) and interpersonal (40% vs. 42%) circumstances.
Conclusions: While descriptive, these findings help contextualize suicide mortality during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and can inform mental health promotion efforts during similar public health emergencies.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared tht no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Mezuk et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)