Google searches for suicide and suicide risk factors in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which causes the COVID-19 respiratory illness, emerged in December of 2019 and has since spread globally. The dramatic lifestyle changes and stressors associated with this pandemic pose a threat to mental health and have the potential to exacerbate risk factors for suicide. We used autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to assess Google Trends data representing searches in the United States for 18 terms related to suicide and known suicide risk factors following the emergence of COVID-19. Although the relative proportion of Google searches for suicide-related queries was lower than predicted during the early pandemic period, searches for the following queries representative of financial difficulty were dramatically elevated: "I lost my job

SUBMITTER: Halford EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7380602 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature