There was a lot of collateral damage that occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but some of the worst of it occurred to teen girls. No, they didn’t die, and we can all be thankful for that. However, a new report has shown that suicide attempts by this group spiked according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among adolescent girls from the ages of 12-17, the average weekly visits to the emergency room for a suspected suicide attempt from February 2021 to March 2021 was over 50% higher than this same period in 2020, according to a CDC analysis. Boys were less likely to show suicidal tendencies during that same time period; that number of emergency room visits for suicide attempts only rose by a mark of 3.7%.
“In late May 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents from the ages of 12 to 17 years, especially among teen girls,” the CDC study said.
From late July to the end of August 2020, the average weekly number of emergency room visits among teen girls had increased by 26.2% from the previous year.
“The study likely underrepresents the real number of suspected suicide attempts because Americans were hesitant to go to hospitals during the pandemic, in fear of contracting COVID-19,” according to CNBC. “In spring 2020, there was a 16.8% drop in emergency department visits among men and women aged 18 to 24 compared with the same time period a year prior.”
The study hypothesized that the stresses related to the COVID-19 pandemic may have been a toxic threat to the mental health of these young people.
“Young people might have been a group at high risk because it’s possible they were particularly affected by the mitigation measures, such as the physical distancing (which would mean a lack of connectedness to schools, peers, and teachers); barriers to mental health treatment; increases in the abuse of substances; and anxiety about the health of loved ones and associated economic problems, and these are all risk factors for suicide,” the CDC study said.
Granted, the CDC suggested that one reason for this might be due to parents spending more time with their children at home. Perhaps they had been tipped off to their suicidal ideation.
“The findings from this study suggest that more severe distress among young females is present than what has actually been reported in previous examples during this pandemic, and this definitely reinforces the need for increased attention to, and preventative measures for, this population,” the CDC said regarding the significant difference between suicide attempts by boys and girls.
States began implementing stay-at-home orders in March 2020. By the end of that month, 32 out of the 50 U.S. states had been completely locked down.
The CDC noted that this increase in suicide attempts did not actually mean that more deaths had occurred. The suicide rate among young individuals aged from 15-24 from the third quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2020 did not really have a significant change, according to the study.
Earlier studies also found that there was an alarming increase in suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic. A poll was conducted in June 2020 by the CDC that found that over 25% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 24 had reported “serious thoughts of considering suicide in the 30 days before completing the survey.”
This was especially true in Las Vegas, which experienced a rash of suicides, forcing the school district to partially reopen in January 2021.
Drug overdose deaths in the United States also surged during the coronavirus pandemic, reaching the highest totals since the opioid epidemic began, according to the CDC.
How do you feel about these alarming statistics?
