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by panny 1859 days ago
They didn't? Here's an article stating the suicide rate had exceeded a year average in a few months in a California hospital,

https://fee.org/articles/a-years-worth-of-suicide-attempts-i...

And on the east coast in GA, the same,

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lockdown-suicides-on-t...

These articles are during the low point stated in the OP article.

2 comments

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.

>known right-wing advocacy groups

Known to who? Do you have a list of approved sources we are allowed to use and are not sharing?

Both sources provided are not news organizations, they are agenda-driven opinion peddlers. It is not hard to figure this out.
Right. I think the article in the OP is based on questionable data
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".