Predicting suicide rates during the COVID-19 pandemic using a pre-pandemic death rate model

Abstract

A recent publication reports lower-than-expected or stabilized suicide rates across many countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been proposed that these decreases and stabilizations in suicide rates are attributable to communities rallying together in difficult times. However, this claim conflicts with the finding that disorder-level anxiety and depression have increased during the pandemic. This brief commentary offers an alternative interpretation of these trends through Erwin Stengel’s theory that suicide attempts are often a means for reviving crumbling interpersonal or romantic relationships. Stengel suggests that a suicide attempt is an appeal to the value held by others of the attempter’s life. Accordingly, suicide will become rarer in times when the overall value of life within a society is lower, such as in times of war or genocide. This is because the reconciliatory power of suicide attempts diminishes in times when death is common. Stemming from this, Stengel made a specific prediction that increasing deathrates would correspond to dampening suicide rates. Factually, we have observed these exact trends during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, modern renditions of Stengel’s theory (i.e., the signalling perspective of suicide) emphasise the importance of social networks in the causation of suicide. The pandemic has been disruptive to people’s social networks (e.g., during quarantine periods), thus a dampening in suicide rates is expected. Naturally, the disintegration of social networks would be expected to cause distress—but the signalling perspective uniquely predicts that this will also cause a dampening in suicide rates.