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Abstract
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In a recent article published in this journal, Reinke et al. (2023) reported that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive patients in the US displayed a higher likelihood of having suicidal ideation, though COVID-19 negative subjects were instead more likely to have suicidal intentions during the pandemic.1 To provide additional insights on this important social healthcare aspect, we estimated the popularity of suicidal intentions in the US before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by means of an infodemiological analysis.
We conducted a digital search accessing Google Trends (Google Inc. Mountain View, CA, US) with the keyword "suicide", within the definition of "search term", setting the geographical location to "United States", and restricting the analysis to the past 6 years (i.e., from January 2018 to January 2023). The weekly Google Trends score for suicide, thus reflecting its Web popularity and expected prevalence in the US (Vaidyanathan et al., 2022), was downloaded into a Microsoft Excel file (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, United States). We classified two search period as "pre-COVID" (between January 2018 and February 2020; 112 weeks) and "COVID" (from March 2020 to January 2023; 149 weeks). The weekly Google Trends score for suicide, thus mirroring the volume of Google searches for this term, was reported as median and interquartile range (IQR), and differences between periods were analyzed using Mann-Whitney test (analyse-it Software Ltd, Leeds, UK). The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, under the terms of relevant local legislation. This analysis was based on electronic searches in an open and publicly available repository (Google Trends), and thus no informed consent or Ethical Committee approval were necessary...
Language: en |