Trends in suicide deaths before and after the COVID-19 outbreak in Korea
Seunghyong Ryu,
Hee Jung Nam,
Min Jhon,
Ju-Yeon Lee,
Jae-Min Kim and
Sung-Wan Kim
PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 9, 1-12
Abstract:
We investigated the effect of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on suicide trends in Korea via a time-series analysis. We used Facebook Prophet to generate forecasting models based on the monthly numbers of suicide deaths in Korea between 1997 and 2018, validated the models by comparison with the 2019 numbers, and predicted the numbers of suicides in 2020. We compared the expected and observed numbers of suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic. The total numbers of suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic did not deviate from projections based on the pre-pandemic period. However, the number of suicides among women and those under the age of 34 years significantly exceeded the expected level. The COVID-19 pandemic did not increase the overall suicide rate significantly. However, suicides among women and young people increased, suggesting that the pandemic might drive more members of these groups to suicide. Further studies are needed to verify the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide.
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0273637 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 73637&type=printable (application/pdf)
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:plo:pone00:0273637
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273637
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().