Factors influencing self-harm thoughts and behaviours over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK: longitudinal analysis of 49 324 adults
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Abstract
There is concern that the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath will result in excess suicides by increasing known risk factors such as self-harm, but evidence on how pandemic-related risk factors contribute to changes in these outcomes is lacking.
Aims
To examine how different COVID-19-related experiences of and worries about adversity contribute to changes in self-harm thoughts and behaviours.
Method
Data from 49 324 UK adults in the University College London COVID-19 Social Study were analysed (1 April 2020 to 17 May 2021). Fixed-effects regressions explored associations between weekly within-person variation in five categories of adversity experience and adversity worries with changes in self-harm thoughts and behaviours across age groups (18–29, 30–44, 45–59 and 60+ years).
Results
In total, 26.1% and 7.9% of respondents reported self-harm thoughts and behaviours respectively at least once over the study period. The number of adverse experiences was more strongly related to outcomes than the number of worries. The largest specific adversity contributing to increases in both outcomes was having experienced physical or psychological abuse. Financial worries increased the likelihood of both outcomes in most age groups, and having had COVID-19 increased the likelihood of both outcomes in young (18–29 years) and middle-aged (45–59 years) adults.
Conclusions
Findings suggest that a significant portion of UK adults may be at increased risk for self-harm thoughts and behaviours during the pandemic. Given the likelihood that the economic and social consequences of the pandemic will accumulate, policy makers can begin adapting evidence-based suicide prevention strategies and other social policies to help mitigate its consequences.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.19.21252050: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: All procedures involving human subjects were approved by the UCL Ethics Committee.
Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.19.21252050: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: All procedures involving human subjects were approved by the UCL Ethics Committee.
Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.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.
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