NJ.com covers the decrease in suicide rates during COVID-19.
As the pandemic continues, New Jersey has actually experienced a drop in suicide rate. Fewer people took their own lives in the months of March and April, than in the two prior years, preliminary state data shows. But mental health experts warn that could change as the months of social isolation and economic hardship grow, and as worries of a reinvigorated outbreak continue.
Experts offer several reasons why an uptick in suicide has yet to be seen:
The immediacy of the initial crisis: As coronavirus hit New Jersey hard, residents were so involved in addressing the rudiments of life — how to educate their children from home, how to ensure their elderly parents were safe, how to keep paying the bills — that they may have been less likely to dwell on their own psychological troubles.
“People all of a sudden had to spend all their time taking care of child care, providing for basic needs,” Finch said. “If you give someone a reason to live and now it is, ‘I have to take care of my family who is in crisis,’ that is actually a suicide deterrent.”
Read more here: https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/07/experts-feared-a-spike-in-suicides-as-coronavirus-slammed-nj-but-data-shows-they-actually-dropped.html
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