A Following Wave Pattern of Suicide-Related Pediatric Emergency Room Admissions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tomer Mevorach (), Gil Zur, Noa Benaroya-Milshtein, Alan Apter, Silvana Fennig and Shira Barzilay
Additional contact information
Tomer Mevorach: Department of Psychiatry, Feinberg Child Study Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Petach Tikva 4920235, Israel
Gil Zur: The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9112102, Israel
Noa Benaroya-Milshtein: Department of Psychiatry, Feinberg Child Study Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Petach Tikva 4920235, Israel
Alan Apter: Department of Psychiatry, Feinberg Child Study Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Petach Tikva 4920235, Israel
Silvana Fennig: Department of Psychiatry, Feinberg Child Study Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Petach Tikva 4920235, Israel
Shira Barzilay: Department of Psychiatry, Feinberg Child Study Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Petach Tikva 4920235, Israel

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 2, 1-8

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and response, which included physical distancing and stay-at-home orders, disrupted the daily lives of children and adolescents, isolating them from their peers, school, and other meaningful contacts. The present study aims to add to the accumulating evidence on the pandemic’s impact on child and adolescent suicidal behavior. Data were extracted from Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel’s pediatric emergency room (ER) admissions for psychiatric consultation for suicidal-risk assessment between 1 January 2020, and 16 April 2022. We applied time-lagged cross-correlation analysis and a Granger causality test to assess the temporal relationships between COVID-19 infection waves and patterns of suicide-related ER admissions. The results revealed a significant lagged correlation between national COVID-19 infection rates and ER admission rates. The highest correlation was above 0.4 and was found with a lag of 80 to 100 days from infection rate to ER admission rate. The findings show that the effects of public crises change over time and may be lagged. This may have important implications for mental health services’ readiness to serve growing numbers of children and adolescents at risk for suicide.

Keywords: suicide; COVID-19; emergency room; risk assessment; suicide attempt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/2/1619/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/2/1619/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:2:p:1619-:d:1037477

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().