Self-harm during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic in England: Comparative trend analysis of hospital presentations

  1. Keith Hawton
  2. Deborah Casey
  3. Elizabeth Bale
  4. Fiona Brand
  5. Jennifer Ness
  6. Keith Waters
  7. Samantha Kelly
  8. Galit Geulayov

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Abstract

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  1. Version published to 10.1016/j.jad.2021.01.015
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.25.20238030: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethical approval: The monitoring systems in Oxford and Derby have Health Research Authority and National Health Service (NHS) Research Ethics Committee approval.
    Consent: The two monitoring systems are fully compliant with the Data Protection Act (1998) and have approval under Section 251 of the NHS Act (2006) to collect patient-identifiable information without patient consent.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableWe have compared changes in numbers of presentations between males and females, including calculating the gender ratio before and after lockdown.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Analyses were conducted using SPSS v25 and Stata v14.2.
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)
    Stata
    suggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Strengths and Limitations: The data for this study were collected through two well-established self-harm monitoring systems (Geulayov et al., 2016), which also allowed us to compare data following lockdown with earlier periods, including in 2019. However, they are based on episodes where the individuals received a psychosocial assessment. In both hospitals the proportion of all self-harm presentations to the emergency departments in which a psychosocial assessment is conducted is high (approximately 75%) especially compared with other hospitals in England (Cooper et al., 2013). We have no reason to believe that this proportion decreased during the period of lockdown, although there was some reduction in the availability of mental health staff in one centre. Also, our findings are similar to those being reported anecdotally from other hospitals in England, in Paris during the first four weeks of lockdown (Pignon et al., 2020), in Madrid during the early stages of the pandemic (Hernandez-Calle et al., 2020) and in presentations of individuals with suicidal ideation to emergency departments in the USA (Smalley et al., 2020).

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.25.20238030v1 on medRxiv