It was reported last week that despite fears of the mental health crisis prompted by the lockdowns leading to a spike in suicides in 2020, the number of people committing suicide in the U.K. did not rise after the first lockdown. While the provisional rate of suicides for 2020 is lower than that of 2019, this may be due to delays to coroner inquests, meaning the actual figure could be much higher, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The Mail has the story.
Registered suicides in England fell in 2020 as inquests were delayed during the coronavirus pandemic, official data shows.
Some 4,902 suicides were registered across the country last year – giving a provisional rate of 9.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 people, the ONS said.
That represents a fall from 2019, when the rate was 10.8 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.
The ONS said the fall “most likely reflects delays to coroner inquests, because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, as opposed to a genuine decrease in suicide”.
The 2020 figures are provisional and will be finalised by the ONS in late 2021.
All deaths by suicide are investigated by coroners, with deaths usually registered around five to six months after they occur due to the length of time it takes to hold an inquest.
Of the suicides registered in 2020, more than half (51.2%) occurred that year. Some 3,674 involved males, and 1,228 females.
Between April and June 2020, during the first national lockdown, the provisional suicide rate fell by 36.1% compared with the same period in 2019.
The number of registered suicides in this quarter was the lowest since 2001.
This is most likely to be due to the impact of the pandemic on the coroner’s service, such as delays to inquests as the service adapted to social distancing measures, the ONS said.
The number of registered suicides increased in the second half of 2020, most likely due to inquests resuming, the ONS said.
In November, the charity Rethink Mental Illness said the number of people turning to its website for support with suicidal thoughts had tripled in the first six months of lockdown. A new study also found that the lack of in-person treatments – because of lockdowns – has made mental health patients feel as though they “were missing out on care”.
The Mail’s report is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A report from the Journal of the American Medical Association shows a decrease in U.S. suicides in 2020 by 2,700, from 47,500 to 44,800. But, at the same time, there was a substantial increase in the number of “unintended injury” deaths (an increase of 19,000 from 2019) which was “largely driven by drug overdose[s]”.
Dr Gary Ordog, MD, from the Department of Health Services in the County of Los Angeles (retired) said:
I was surprised by the suicide rate reported to have a major decrease in 2020. It seems from most other reports that the suicide rate has increased since the pandemic began. This may be explained by the fact that the category of “Unintentional Injury” had a major increase at the same time, and the fact that this category includes drug overdoses. As there is often inadequate history in a fatal drug overdose case, many of these may be purposeful and so suicidal. This would explain the perceived increase in suicide rate since the current pandemic began. Perhaps further analysis of the data would elucidate this incongruity.
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I thought it was a wind-up when I read that the Humber Bridge had recently been closed to pedestrians (and cyclists) because of the high number of suicide attempts, so I was unpleasantly surprised to see the notices confirming this when I drove over it last week. This is another statistic that the government is keen to hide from view…
Six in one month. Previously there was an average of 7 per year.
Yet more sleight of hand from our government.
There’s also the factor of ‘deaths by misadventure’ which sometimes can, in reality, be acts of suicide that cannot be proved conclusively. Although I guess that’s a factor every year to be fair
If the number of suicides in 2020 really declined, I’ll never post again.
London Ambulance Service tweeted in October that they were being called out to an average of 37 suicides and attempted suicides every day. That’s a 68% increase on 2019.I knew the report was BS the minute I heard the Beeb reporting it. Sadly by the time they actually do release the final figures the public will no doubt have moved on. We’ll be waiting at least another year and a half to see the impact of the most recent lockdown.
He hanged himself, he shot himself, he took poison, he jumped off the Humber Bridge. On the death certificate he was said to have died of Covid.
This is sick. It’s deliberately stamping on the families who’ve lost children due to lockdowns, or children who’ve lost parents. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling I don’t want to be right about this, but it is beyond any sort of credibility that suicides didn’t increase over the last year and this is just an attempt to hide these statistics under the mattress.
I’m loosing track of the number of suicides and attempted suicides off bridges over the A50 between Derby and Stoke. May be I will be proven wrong but my perception is that suicides have risen massively this past year.
Two people I know (one a was friend of my family) have committed suicide since this tyranny started. Today, my fiancée was alerted to the terrible news of a colleague’s husband’s suicide.
I don’t need ‘official’ statistics or any BBC-type bastard telling me this immeasurable crime is not pushing unprecedented numbers of people to kill themselves.
The delay in reporting suicide stats makes the ONS web site a useless source, however the individual suicide hot spots, like the Humber Bridge, increases act as a relatively reliable indication of the problem across the country. The question is how to find this information if its not reported in the press.
Every single day Local Live (mirror group news) publish 1, 2 or 3 stories about ‘woman found dead at bottom of cliffs’, ‘man found dead in car on bridge’ or ‘popular pub landlord found dead at home’.
They go on to report that Police say there are no suspicious circumstances and that the Coroner has been informed.
They never, ever use the word ‘suicide’ so it will be impossible to Google (other search engines are available).
In normal times, there is a delay of 6-8 months before suicide statistics appear in official figures. This is because, as stated, cases have to go through the coroner’s system. In March 2020, the coroner’s system, for all practical purposes, closed down for four months. So that means it’s around a year behind. Added to which, the evidence from mental health charities reporting a higher-than-normal incidence of suicide attempts suggests the coroner’s system may be falling even further behind with their caseload. The bottom line is: we haven’t yet had anything approaching full, accurate data on suicides for pretty much the whole lockdown period. How very convenient for the government and lockdown zealots. For anyone to claim there has been a drop in suicides is not only unbelievable, it is downright mendacious.
all deaths are covid deaths
it is all we die from now
Jumped off Cifton Suspension Bridge and caught covid on the way down
In wartime, official suicide rates tend to drop – one reason might be that more people have a heightened sense of purpose compared to peacetime, but it is also possible that soldiers or sailors take excessive risks to get the enemy to kill them, achieved their aim, and were marked down as killed in action.
On the German side, General Fritsch had been targeted by an attempt to label him a homosexual and had to step down. He later accompanied his unit in the invasion of Poland in 1939 and seemed to deliberately expose himself to fire from a Polish machine-gunner, who duly scored a fatal hit on Fritsch. It looked like suicide but officially he was killed in action.
In WW1 quite a few British soldiers who could not take it any more shot themselves, but if they were anywhere near the front line they were usually put down as killed in action.
In wartime, like with Covid, suicide can be disguised as something else.
All excess suicides will go down as “Covid related”