From my own anecdotal perspective, I have a depression/anxiety diagnosis, and may have at times had suicidal thoughts, but I would have never really acted on them.
For me, life got easier and less stress free, mainly because I don't ever have to go outside and I got to work from home, which pretty much solved the "social anxiety" issue for me. I never felt comfortable at office and felt always stressed. So I've been happy and relieved about being locked in.
Whether it's good in the long term, I'm not sure however, because I will get even less experience putting myself out there.
While recognising the possible “long term” challenge of not putting yourself out there, are you going to be able to sustain some of this new way of working post-COVID? (Ie primarily working from home). It seems like it’s good for you.
I found a similar experience. Working from home is VERY good for my mental health. My anxiety almost disappeared completely at times.
My dilemma is similar to yours. I have the ability to work from home forever now and never attend another in-person meeting again (became self-employed during COVID).
However, like you, I recognise that I’ll need to ensure I don’t become a complete recluse and never leave the apartment! :)
I have depression and anxiety and the pandemic ended up helping me a lot. Yeah, the isolation sucked, but it did help my anxiety a bit when I stayed to myself.
During that time of reduced anxiety, I was able to introspect a bit more without external stressors and was able to identify some trauma that led to the depression and anxiety -- something that I wasn't even aware was affecting me.
I really don't know how to actually deal with said trauma, so I'll be going to therapy for that, but I think the lessons I learned and the benefits I gained will stick with me since I'm taking concrete steps to deal with it now that I've identified a problem.
Without the year long pause we all went through I'm not sure I would have had the time to sort through my brain so thoroughly.
Congrats on the positive steps you’re taking, following that bit of introspection!
> Without the year long pause we all went through I'm not sure I would have had the time to sort through my brain so thoroughly.
I feel exactly the same way.
Re: therapy, if you haven’t done it before, be prepared that you might need to try a couple of different therapists to get the right fit. But it sounds like the absolute right thing for you to be doing. You definitely need someone to work through it with you.
Yeah, it's weird the author didn't discuss these positive aspects of the lockdowns and other measures.
There's plenty of mention and data to support it, like decreased number of miscarriages.
Anecdotally, I know a number of Alzheimer patients in care facilities did much better when their families weren't allowed to visit them. Painful of course, but probably just related to 'normal' life in these homes being too crazy and them needing more quiet space. Others did worse.
To me suicide is an reaction to this thought: "things are bad for me, and they are never going to get better." If you think your life might get significantly better in the next couple of years, you probably aren't likely to commit suicide.
I'm sure many people experienced sudden and traumatizing depression with the onset of Covid. But we mostly all knew it would be temporary - we knew things would get better again, even if we didn't know the timelines. There wasn't a "forever" there, so suicide wasn't a common reaction.
About 1/3 of people who attempt suicide do so in response to an immediate trigger, and if stopped, never try again. That's why immediate intervention has such a good success rate. And that's ignoring the people who are going through a longer term but still temporary (certainly less than a year) struggle.
I think you're assuming "this is when a rational actor would commit suicide". And for some people, e.g. the terminally ill, this is true.
This is a good point. But I do also think that a perspective of despair is part and parcel of depression. It may depend of the kind of depression though.
From my own experience with depression, it's the lack of joy rather than the sadness that is hard to suffer through. It's helplessness rather than sadness, a loss of feeling rather than feeling too much. But depression shrinks any perspective on tomorrow and just leaves you powerless in the here and now, though not in a good way. It's more like having to give up because everything is too heavy, a felt sense of not being able to affect your world. Sadness itself due to bad events is usually not a problem, it's part of life even if we attempt to eradicate it. The problem begins when you get stuck in the sadness, and then everything shrinks away in a dark void where you don't feel sadness nor joy, just a heavy, tired numbness.
Sometimes a depressed person's initial stage out of a depression is the one where he or she is most at risk of committing suicide. Because you need to feel some sense of control and overcome your fears in order to do it.
From what I've been told, suicide is often impulsive, and when it's not impulsive it's an escape from some kind of psychological or physical agony - like you're in a burning building and jump out the window. If you're in a room that's on fire, then knowledge that it won't be on fire a month from now won't keep you in the room. I think it's a tough subject to generalize.
Going all the way down in the 90's made me aware that "this too shall pass" is a way of life I live by.
As a coping mechanism, waiting out the tough times seems to work.
I wonder how many people could be helped by knowing that the glib "it gets better" is true, "but you have to feel like this until then" is the part they don't remind you of?
This is easy to explain. ‘Death of despair’-related suicides, which are the kind that have been rising in most developed countries for the past few decades, are overwhelmingly a matter of people feeling stagnant or hopeless in their socioeconomic circumstances. Note drug-related issues are very often, if not usually, downstream from those socioeconomic issues.
And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
The only reason this comes as a surprise to so many people is that capitalism suggests that all progress is inherently good with no contingencies, or it draws a binary between progress and regression. Associated with that is American hyper-individualism. Ask a Marxist, for example, and they will offer an understanding of society which centers those who reproduce it, and along with that a sophisticated interest in theories of alienation and the role alienation plays in a person’s relations to their society. For a Marxist, these statistics would have been expected.
> And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
Well said. This goes beyond even the socioeconomic causes of suicide that you mentioned and surely includes people with depression, (social) anxiety disorders, etc.
As an anecdotal data point, I have social anxiety, and depression diagnosed and I have been feeling relieved by the whole thing.
Going to office etc, left me with constant worries and thought cycles, energy spent on analysing and overthinking social situations. Now there's just video calls/chat messages I have to worry about and there's fewer attack vectors for worries there.
Same with random/events parties happening, even with friends I never felt very comfortable attending. Now I always had the perfect excuse to just stay at home.
I wouldn't say "capitalism" so much as "run-away capitalism", and the marxist stuff was probably where your downvotes came from. But that aside I agree, and this was more or less what I was going to post. Perhaps unlike you, I do generally like "progress" and believe that it "lifts all ships." But in the past several decades, this has become less and less true, for a variety of reasons. And fundamentally, you have to be sure most of your society has the basics before getting wrapped up in ever-increasing wild dreams of the future. For a little bit, those who were getting left behind didn't feel their disenfranchisement quite so painfully. I wonder if we'll have a nasty surprise when things crank back to full power again.
> when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
Exactly, and I'd expect them to rise once things go back to "normal" because those who were already in a bad situation before Covid will rightfully feel left behind once more.
I don’t blame you for this, but this is a bit of a narrow view in my opinion. There are lots of people that lost their jobs (eg in retail) and now face a total crisis because not only are they out of work, but the entire sector that they worked in has imploded and will never be the same again.
At least in the UK, government support was not enough to replace full-time incomes, so those living month to month would have had a very tough time on a reduced income.
I know of lots of well paid people who were happily furloughed and took “free money”, and others who carried on working, with arguably better working conditions (from home, no committing, lower costs)
But for many people in lower paid jobs and with lower incomes I’m sure the situation has been very depressing at times. Not to mention those who I’ve been very ill or lost loved ones.
I have had a very positive COVID experience. Really all of the benefits and none of the downsides (so far). I expected many on HN will be the same. Most of us can comfortably work from home, many already did, and we are (on average) a well paid group.
But I’ve also felt incredibly guilty at times at how “happy” I’ve been at various points during lockdown, while knowing full well that many others are having the exact opposite experience.
>I’m tempted to wonder if people are misclassifying suicides as overdoses
Which would not surprise me in the least given the data is coming from CDC. Everyone from all sides seem to agree that CDC lost lots of credibility with coronavirus.
Even if we ignore the fact that an overdose is not a suicide, those 90k are right in line with the trend from prior years. 2018 and 2019 were a bit anomalous, but if you look at the CDC data is is quite clear that there is nothing unexpected about that number and if you were in 2015 and guessing what the 2020 numbers would be then 90k would be a safe bet.
> 2018 and 2019 were a bit anomalous, but if you look at the CDC data is is quite clear that there is nothing unexpected about that number and if you were in 2015 and guessing what the 2020 numbers would be then 90k would be a safe bet.
Seems like you're cherry picking data which somewhat supports your hypothesis while ignoring the more recent data which does not.
For those that want to draw their own conclusions, here's the data:
Cherry-picking? There has been steady upward growth year after year except for a single year (2018) that reset the numbers downward. The following year was another rise so, in fact, the most recent data _does_ support the hypothesis. The numbers have been constantly growing and continued growth is not exceptional, that hypothesis misses one year in the past 20.
It was the largest increase because of the large drop in 2018 and small 2019 rise from that low point. Yes, I am saying that the 2020 rise was in line with expectations and any attempt to link it to lockdown will be weak. In five years they will be able to show the graph without years on it and most would guess 2018 as the lockdown year due to the anamoly.
Many overdoses are the result of inconsistent potency. This is trivial to solve by letting addicts get their dope from a licensed pharmacist instead of the sketchy dealer down the block. Another common cause of overdoses is people who lost their tolerance taking a dose that they would have with their previous tolerance.
To attribute every suicide as an overdose is wrong on many levels.
Nobody sets out to overdose. I would agree that most people started taking heroin from a low point, but overdose is not an inevitable consequence nor is it necessarily a short-term outcome. Someone could have started using opioids a decade ago and finally had the numbers (and dangers of recent mixes that added fentanyl) catch up with them.
while there are merits to "harm reduction", none of its proponents think through logical consequences.
you may argue a heroin addict has a right to heroin, but does a pangolin scale juicer have that right also and is the government now responsible for supplying them with safe pangolin scales?
what is the "correct" amount of heroin a person should be able to get from a pharmacy? how much should that cost? what if the "correct" amount for me is just under lethal dose and im essentially comatose between hits? is that society's responsibility to nurture my addiction. why is a single state-issued dose compassionate care, when many addicts need 4 or 5 doses per day to feel good? when i can longer afford the pharmaceutical dose, won't i just go back to street heroin?
if it's blindingly obvious that no state should seek to ensure that a "just-under-lethal-comatose-all-day" type of habit is supported and funded by the state, why would the state think it has some obligation to fund and support any habit at all. people get hooked on gambling and sky-diving too, but no reasonable people think it's the state's responsibility to maintain those.
This is a bit of a straw man. The govt. doesn't need to support all habits. What it needs to do is support a stable and prosperous society.
The drug war can be won, but it will be compassion, empathy, and the invisible hand of the market that wins it. If there's high demand for something illegal, and there's a bunch of negative externalities to the illegal trade, it seems smarter to have some moderated legal trade to put the illegal trade out of business.
A relatively simple plan that isn't perfect but is arguably much better than what we have today would be something like this: if you are a drug addict, you can get a drug test to prove you are hooked, and then get on a free but gently tapered government supply with optional therapy. "Club" drugs that people will generally do sporadically (cocaine, MDMA, shrooms) are sold over the counter with either a positive drug test or a street sample, limited with a personal use quota. The government drugs are all chemically tagged or variants not available on the street, so it will be possible to detect and respond to diversion.
As a drug dealer, this would be a nightmare, since all your best customers will disappear, and you can't even smurf the government supply because your smurfs keep getting caught clean (diverting) and get their supply cut off.
I don't think anyone is entitled to an unlimited supply of their drug of choice from the state. but I do think they are entitled to a relatively safe supply of their poison, free from dangerous cuts (fentanyl, levamisole, etc.) and the threat of violence (from either the state or the seller). if they die, so be it. that was always a possibility.
beyond that, it becomes a cost-benefit analysis for the rest of us. unlike gambling or sky-diving, drugs of abuse are pretty cheap to manufacture. it might be cheaper to just give people drugs than to deal with the constant petty theft perpetrated by addicts. or it might not be, who knows?
Uh we know, it's definitely cheaper. It's the random nature of potency and scoring drugs that contributes to the addiction. If provided cheap high quality heroin an addict will eventually get bored and find a way to transition.
> none of its proponents think through logical consequences.
They do. Can you point me to the page you read about heroin maintenance that didn't include anything about the consequences?
> you may argue a heroin addict has a right to heroin
Nobody has a right to heroin. What people have is a right to life; a right to health; a right to not be harmed by treatment. Current treatment for heroin addiction, especially if it's based on abstinence alone, violates each of these. Heroin substitutes are best, but they're not suitable for everyone and some people are not ready to move onto a substitute. In these cases we should provide legal heroin to maintain the habit. This would preserve this person's rights. Importantly, it would preserve the rights of the people around this person. This person no longer has to steal or sell sex in order to fund their habit.
> but does a pangolin scale juicer
I genuinely have no idea what point you're trying to make with "pangolin scale juice".
> what is the "correct" amount of heroin
Enough to maintain their current use pattern, with the aim to gradually reduce and then switch to a substitute. But with the recognition that just giving people heroin for the rest of their life is better for them and for the rest of society than forcing them to get illicit opioids.
> how much should that cost?
Diamorphine is incredibly cheap. Providing diamorphine in a safe setting is costly - you need a trained, qualified, registered, healthcare professional to monitor patients who are self injecting. You need a building that's insured and cleaned, run by a service that's subject to some form of oversight. But, again, all of this is far cheaper than just leaving addicts to source illicit opioids.
> what if the "correct" amount for me is just under lethal dose and im essentially comatose between hits?
You should probably stop talking about addiction if you're this ignorant.
> is that society's responsibility to nurture my addiction.
You keep saying things like this, and it highlights how you've fundamentally misunderstood the point. We're not "nurturing addiction", we are treating addiction with a safe, effective, evidence-based approach. Why do we give insulin to T1 diabetics? Are we nurturing their diabetes? No, it's fucking stupid to say so. We're treating a chronic health condition.
> why is a single state-issued dose compassionate care, when many addicts need 4 or 5 doses per day to feel good?
Addicts don't take heroin to feel good. They take heroin to avoid feeling bad.
> when i can longer afford the pharmaceutical dose, won't i just go back to street heroin?
Yes, which is one of the reasons
> people get hooked on gambling and sky-diving too, but no reasonable people think it's the state's responsibility to maintain those.
We should be providing addiction services to people who are addicted to gambling. So far the evidence for problem gambling is clear: more gambling is harmful, not helpful. This is the reason we don't recommend subsidising gambling for problem gamblers.
I guess the problem with the overdose theory he mentioned is it would be quite odd that all of the excess suicides would manifest in one way. But maybe if you break down suicides by method you could see something.
Regardless, I think it’s interesting how we all just assumed they had to go up during lock down. It’s a reminder that depression is very complex, and our intuitions about how to fix it can be wildly off.
Do you have sources other than known right-wing advocacy groups for these claims?
As a simple example the FEE article is nothing but random anecdotes, while the NR article does not have supporting data for the headline claim but tries to play a similar game by suggesting that opioid overdose deaths should be categorized as either suicides or suicide attempts. Articles attempting to manufacture a suicide problem related to the lockdown also tend to mix in 'suicide ideation' with suicide attempts, usually while ignoring the fact that surveys of such ideation have almost no depth to them and seem to be a recent invention to try to answer the undeniable fact that actual suicides have decreased.
The data is probably good, but SA has a habit of dumping 48 different sources into an article, and pulling out 250 short snippets from those sources. So things tend to get misunderstood or misrepresented. The original researchers are often very careful to put a bunch of context in, and he just strips all of that out. Because there's so much stuff there it takes an age to go through and verify it all, so any debunking happens in two weeks time. And by then the HN thread has closed and no-one cares.
I'm most familiar with the English data and SA gets a fair amount wrong. In England the message is very much "no rise yet, but we need to be cautious about the future".
For me, life got easier and less stress free, mainly because I don't ever have to go outside and I got to work from home, which pretty much solved the "social anxiety" issue for me. I never felt comfortable at office and felt always stressed. So I've been happy and relieved about being locked in.
Whether it's good in the long term, I'm not sure however, because I will get even less experience putting myself out there.