Department of Psychiatry, Chonnam National University Medical School, Gwangju, Korea.
Department of Psychiatry, Seoul Medical Center, Seoul, Korea.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 12;17(9):e0273637. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273637. eCollection 2022.
We investigated the effect of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on suicide trends in Korea via a time-series analysis. We used Facebook Prophet to generate forecasting models based on the monthly numbers of suicide deaths in Korea between 1997 and 2018, validated the models by comparison with the 2019 numbers, and predicted the numbers of suicides in 2020. We compared the expected and observed numbers of suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic. The total numbers of suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic did not deviate from projections based on the pre-pandemic period. However, the number of suicides among women and those under the age of 34 years significantly exceeded the expected level. The COVID-19 pandemic did not increase the overall suicide rate significantly. However, suicides among women and young people increased, suggesting that the pandemic might drive more members of these groups to suicide. Further studies are needed to verify the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide.
我们通过时间序列分析研究了 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行对韩国自杀趋势的影响。我们使用 Facebook Prophet 根据韩国 1997 年至 2018 年每月自杀死亡人数生成预测模型，通过与 2019 年的数据进行比较来验证模型，并预测 2020 年的自杀人数。我们比较了 COVID-19 大流行期间预期和观察到的自杀人数。COVID-19 大流行期间的自杀总人数与基于大流行前时期的预测相符。然而，女性和 34 岁以下人群的自杀人数明显高于预期水平。COVID-19 大流行并未显著增加总体自杀率。但是，女性和年轻人的自杀人数增加，这表明大流行可能会促使这些群体中的更多成员自杀。需要进一步的研究来验证 COVID-19 大流行对自杀的长期影响。
