New York, Aug 9 : The lockdowns in the Covid-19 pandemic caused an impact on the levels of suicidal thoughts, according to an upcoming study.The study showed that suicidal thought that involves someone who is contemplating or contemplating their own death and significantly increased in the post-lockdown patients in 2020 when compared with patients in the years 2018 and 2019.
“Suicide prevention in the Covid-19 era is a crucial and challenging problem,” the authors, including the lead writer Suzana Tosic Golubovic of the University of Nis in Serbia said.
“Further research studies are required to discover how mental health effects can be reduced both during as well as after the covid-19 pandemic” they said.
During the lockdown the loss of social connections and employment concerns about the economy, anxiety of illnesses as well as feelings of isolation , and the lack of access to psychiatric care acted as stressors that can exacerbate the symptoms of a mental illness or trigger the illness in previously healthy people.
The study was released in the journal Open Medicine, the team reviewed patient records in the psychiatric clinic in Serbia and questioned patients to share their experiences of the pandemic.
The researchers looked into patients admitted to the clinic from May through August of 2020 in the period that followed Serbia had been released of an impasse.They then compared the patients with patients admitted in the same period in 2018 and in 2019.
Suicide attempts were also on the rise in the patients of 2020, though this did not appear statistically significant.The 2020 patients also had more severe rates of adjustment disorder in which people have difficulties adapting to a stressful situation or incident in their lives.
Patients who attempted to commit suicide in 2020 had a higher risk of being exposed about the pandemic through social media , and more likely to be diagnosed with major depression.
Incredibly, 60 percent of the patients who tried suicide in 2020 had not had any psychiatric treatment prior this time, which was a much greater proportion than in those who tried suicide in the year 2019.
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