© KyodoJob-seekers wait for consultation at a public employment service in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward in June. When the economy started reopening, portions of the population were left behind, such as laid-off workers or those who continued to be stuck at home.
Japan is among a few major economies that releases timely data on suicides as it is a persistent societal issue. The numbers hint at what may be going on around the world as countries grapple with the fallout from mass unemployment and social isolation that's impacting certain groups of people more than the rest.
Sociologists have long warned that the economic and social disruption wrought by measures to contain the coronavirus could cause more deaths than the pathogen itself. In Japan, the suicide rate has been falling but it remains a top cause of premature deaths — this year, suicide has taken over 13,000 lives, while total COVID-19 fatalities number less than 2,000.
According to government statistics, the number of suicides in August increased by 15.4 percent to 1,854. Although making up a smaller proportion of suicides, the number of women taking their own lives jumped by around 40 percent. The number of suicides by students in elementary to high school more than doubled to 59 from the same period last year.
The mental health toll looks set to be one of the pandemic's most insidious legacies given the difficulty of grasping or measuring the magnitude of self-inflicted harm until it is too late. Major economies like the U.S. and China don't report official data on suicides until years later, though experts have predicted a wave of such deaths this year while anecdotal evidence abounds on social media platforms.
Comment: Suicide will account for just a fraction of the deaths caused by lockdown, not Covid. In the U.S. at least 1/3 of all excess deaths during lockdown have been a result OF the lockdown. Probably more, since many probably get falsely attributed to Covid.
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