Suicide during the pandemic self-isolation

Abstract

Pursuing the objective of studying the influence, exerted by the inevitable social-economic and personal-psychological problems that engulfed Russia at the time of the quarantine and self-isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on the suicide situation in this country, we have carried out the comparative study of suicide rates across 5 administrative constituent entities of the Russian Federation, which differ in terms of their geographic location and suicide rate. For this purpose, we have looked at two periods of time – April 2019 and April 2020 (the quarantine period). Our study has shown that across all the administrative entities, which took part in the study, suicide rates at the time of the quarantine have declined to a greater or lesser extent. In our opinion, this is not just due to the set of public interventions aimed at preventing the coronavirus infection, but also due to the mobilization of the inner resources of organisms, which we are familiar with as occurring at particularly challenging times in the history of humanity, and which aim at preserving the humankind as the biological species.