YOUTH SUICIDES PLUMMET WITH SCHOOL CLOSURES

There's a Vancouver MD named Tyler Black who I've been following for some time. He's an emergency psychiatrist who studies suicide in children. Not an area most folks want to spend much time thinking or talking about... Black has been exposing how school is lethal for a lot of kids, way too many kids. He first drew my attention to the matter with the discovery of a correlation found between time of year and self harm: that suicides dramatically plummet when school is out, tracking neatly with Summer and Christmas holidays, and shoot back up when school is in session.

Well, Black just shared a new study by a new team using a novel and interesting data set. This time a group of economists, Hansen, Sabia, and Schaller, have taken a look at the mountain of data that has come in from the accidental social experiment that was the pandemic. They just published a Working Paper with their findings.

Though mandates were more and less popular in different locations, effectively all 50 US states shut down schools at some point in 2020. This gave a unique opportunity to have a cleaner look at suicidality as it is related to school. In this instance, most kids didn’t halt their education, only the in-person factor. Too, they didn’t have the mental health boost of summer holiday or Christmas either, while also negotiating the additional burden of a very visible and lethal global heath crisis and all the chaos and unknowns of the early days of the pandemic.

What researchers found was a strong pattern of decline in youth suicides in concert with pandemic-related school closures all across the US. I probably would have bet school closures would have been harder on kids, and of course they were in certain ways... but suicides shot downward. And then when most districts returned to in-person education in the Fall of 2020, suicides shot back up.

Critically, the researchers’ findings stood up to controls for seasonal and general lockdown effects and also survived falsification tests looking at self-harm among young adults. While careful to note the many benefits of in-person learning and how more years of schooling can be a real boon for folks, researchers point to what appears to be the cause of the drop in self-harm: the undeniable benefit of more frequent interactions with family. Another key factor that looks to be at play, revealed by auxiliary analyses of Google Trends queries related to bullying and a Youth Risk Behavior Survey, is the disruption of patterns of bullying in school.

Most interestingly, I found further related research from September of 2022 showing COVID-19 didn’t just disrupt bullying but also cyberbullying. Again, I probably would have bet that its online form would have exploded with a dramatic increase of time online. Their numbers suggest as much as a 35% decline in all bullying with the shift from in-person to remote learning.

What I found disturbing about this research is that, despite dramatically increased awareness and measures for combating the problem of bullying, youth suicide is only getting worse. With a slow decline in the '90s and early '00s, there has been a steady increase since around 2006. Given that comparatively we gave effectively no attention to bullying when I was in school, I would guess that we aren't addressing the fact that teachers are a significant source of daily coercion, intimidation, and frustration in childrens' lives (something I observed in every school I've been to.) I would also wager that the efforts put toward learning about, spotting, and addressing bullying among youth have been highly effective (in many schools and care settings, an overreaction in which any negative utterance is deemed a crime) but at the cost of fortifying kids' mental health.

To me this looks like people dying from eating spinach wrapped in plastic, labelled "pre-washed" and "ready-to-eat." It feels similar to how HIV is taking off again because we have a generation who've known effective treatment, making infection seem like a more benign sexually transmitted infection than the terrible plague I grew up hearing about. Bullying and youth suicide seems, if only to me, similar to how our pandemic was far worse in terms of hospitalizations and deaths in 2022 than in the first two years, despite learning so much and having widespread and effective tools and techniques to prevent transmission. Maybe we can change this.