The Suicide Wave That Never Was
In January, The New York Times published an alarming article about teen suicides during the pandemic. The story featured heartbreaking quotes from parents who had lost children, and was illustrated with photos of an empty classroom and a teenager sitting alone on his bed. The school district of Clark County, Nevada, the story said, had recorded the deaths of 18 students from suicide from mid-March 2020 to the end of December—twice as many as the district had in all of 2019. “There’s a sense of urgency,” the superintendent told NPR, when the same local crisis made national news again in February. “You know, we have a problem.”
The prospect of a wave of suicides has loomed over the national debate about COVID-19 restrictions from their very beginning. Just days after the first stay-at-home orders were put in place, Donald Trump predicted “suicides by the thousands,” and reports emerged of increases in calls to suicide hotlines and emergency-room psychiatric visits. Fears about the mental-health toll on kids were particularly acute: What would happen if they couldn’t go to school, or play sports, or hang out with their friends? While the coronavirus appeared far more worrisome for adults, the harm that the shutdowns posed was another story: Teenagers seemed to be at the greatest risk.
A year later, we’re starting to see signs ofay in surveys that the teenagers in their home have developed new or worsening symptoms of depression and anxiety since the start of the pandemic; a new from the Department of Education states that, as schools begin to reopen, students will need “supports to address the isolation, anxiety, and trauma they have experienced.” Even just watching their kids sleepwalk through months of scholastic gloom and Zoom has given parents reason enough to be concerned.
