Project description:PurposeThis study aimed to determine the relationship between demographic diversity and veterinary professionals regarding their psychological distress and suicidal experiences. This study also aimed to determine what demographic factors were associated with psychological distress and suicidal experiences for veterinary professionals.MethodsThis study used a cross-sectional web-based questionnaire to assess the prevalence of diversity, psychological distress, and suicidality in individuals over 18 working in the veterinary field within the United States. The study received 2,482 responses resulting in 2,208 responses that were included in the analysis. Descriptive statistics were performed to identify the categories with the highest rates of psychological distress, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal behaviors. Binomial logistic regressions were conducted to identify the strongest statistical predictors of psychological distress (Kessler-6-K6), suicidal thinking and suicide behaviors.ResultsOf the 2,208 respondents included in the analysis, 888 (41%) were experiencing serious psychological distress and 381 (17.3%) had considered suicide in the past 12 months. Results of the binomial regressions indicate gender, social class, age, and disability status were the strongest predictors of psychological distress. When controlling for psychological distress, the strongest predictors of suicidal thinking were sexual orientation, marital status, and professional role.ImplicationsLimited research has been done to explore the relationship between demographic diversity of veterinary professionals and psychological distress, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal behaviors specifically. These results shed light on multiple demographic factors that promote and attenuate mental health, as well as the importance of asking respondents their demographic identities in veterinary medicine research. This research attempts to identify these mental health factors without collapsing categories with small sample sizes, which does cause a limitation in statistical power, yet also demonstrates how to increase inclusivity in research.
Project description:Misinformation has become prevalent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand why people believe and share misinformation, we conducted a nationwide survey during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. We found the indirect effects of COVID-19 risk on people's information accuracy judgment and associated information sharing intention through people's emotional states. People faced with a higher level of COVID-19 risk (measured by a 7-day moving average of daily new deaths or new cases) experienced weaker positive and stronger negative emotions, and heightened emotionality (both the positive and negative emotions) was associated with increased belief in and greater likelihood to share the COVID-19 information regardless of veracity. We also found that only the negative emotion mediated the relation between the COVID-19 risk and the truth discernment regarding accuracy judgment. However, the mediating effect of negative emotion disappeared among people with high analytic thinking ability. These findings suggest that the analytic thinking ability could moderate the destructive relationship between negative emotion and accuracy discernment. Based on a large sample, our findings provide actionable insights for the policymakers to respond to the spread of misinformation appropriately and promptly during the pandemic.
Project description:The US population faced stressors associated with suicide brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the relationship between stressors and suicidal ideation in the context of the pandemic may inform policies and programs to prevent suicidality and suicide. We compared suicidal ideation between two cross-sectional, nationally representative surveys of adults in the United States: the 2017-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the 2020 COVID-19 and Life Stressors Impact on Mental Health and Well-being (CLIMB) study (conducted March 31 to April 13). We estimated the association between stressors and suicidal ideation in bivariable and multivariable Poisson regression models with robust variance to generate unadjusted and adjusted prevalence ratios (PR and aPR). Suicidal ideation increased from 3.4% in the 2017-2018 NHANES to 16.3% in the 2020 CLIMB survey, and from 5.8% to 26.4% among participants in low-income households. In the multivariable model, difficulty paying rent (aPR: 1.5, 95% CI: 1.2-2.1) and feeling alone (aPR: 1.9, 95% CI: 1.5-2.4) were associated with suicidal ideation but job loss was not (aPR: 0.9, 95% CI: 0.6 to 1.2). Suicidal ideation increased by 12.9 percentage points and was almost 4.8 times higher during the COVID-19 pandemic. Suicidal ideation was more prevalent among people facing difficulty paying rent (31.5%), job loss (24.1%), and loneliness (25.1%), with each stressor associated with suicidal ideation in bivariable models. Difficulty paying rent and loneliness were most associated with suicidal ideation. Policies and programs to support people experiencing economic precarity and loneliness may contribute to suicide prevention.
Project description:This study aims to identify the timescale of suicidal thinking, leveraging real-time monitoring data and a number of different analytic approaches. Participants were 105 adults with past week suicidal thoughts who completed a 42-d real-time monitoring study (total number of observations = 20,255). Participants completed two forms of real-time assessments: traditional real-time assessments (spaced hours apart each day) and high-frequency assessments (spaced 10 min apart over 1 h). We found that suicidal thinking changes rapidly. Both descriptive statistics and Markov-switching models indicated that elevated states of suicidal thinking lasted on average 1 to 3 h. Individuals exhibited heterogeneity in how often and for how long they reported elevated suicidal thinking, and our analyses suggest that different aspects of suicidal thinking operated on different timescales. Continuous-time autoregressive models suggest that current suicidal intent is predictive of future intent levels for 2 to 3 h, while current suicidal desire is predictive of future suicidal desire levels for 20 h. Multiple models found that elevated suicidal intent has on average shorter duration than elevated suicidal desire. Finally, inferences about the within-person dynamics of suicidal thinking on the basis of statistical modeling were shown to depend on the frequency at which data was sampled. For example, traditional real-time assessments estimated the duration of severe suicidal states of suicidal desire as 9.5 h, whereas the high-frequency assessments shifted the estimated duration to 1.4 h.
Project description:We aimed to do a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies describing suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and suicide and associated risk factors during COVID-19 pandemic. We searched following electronic databases using relevant search terms: Medline, Embase, PsycInfo and CINAHL and systematically reviewed the evidence following PRISMA guidelines. The meta-analysis of prevalence of suicidal ideation was done using random effect model. The search returned 972 records, we examined 106 in full text and included 38 studies describing 120,076 participants. Nineteen studies described suicide or attempted self-harm, mostly in case reports. Out of 19 studies describing suicidal ideations, 12 provided appropriate data for meta-analysis. The pooled prevalence of suicidal ideation in these studies was 12.1% (CI 9.3-15.2). Main risk factors for suicidal ideations were: low social support, high physical and mental exhaustion and poorer self-reported physical health in frontline medical workers, sleep disturbances, quarantine and exhaustion, loneliness, and mental health difficulties. We provide first meta-analytic estimate of suicidal ideation based on large sample from different countries and populations. The rate of suicidal ideations during COVID pandemic is higher than that reported in studies on general population prior to pandemic and may result in higher suicide rates in future.
Project description:BackgroundSuicide is the fourth external cause of death in the world, in persons between the ages of l5 and 29. The objectives of this study were to measure the prevalence of suicidal behavior in university students and analyze the relationship of suicide risk with psychological distress, resilience, and family and social support.MethodsAn observational and transversal study wherein the students at the University of Malaga (Spain) completed an online questionnaire which included items from different scales, sociodemographic and academic questions, and the subjective impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive analyses and prevalence rates of suicidal behavior were calculated, and bivariate analyses, multiple linear regression, and a mediation and moderation analyses were conducted.ResultsA total of 2,212 students completed the questionnaire. The prevalence of the last 6 months was 30.4% wishing for death, 14.7% suicidal ideation, 5% self-harm injuries, and 0.5% suicide attempts. Psychological distress, family and social support were linked to the risk of suicide. Lastly, resilience and family support measure and moderate the relation between psychological stress and suicide risk.ConclusionPsychological distress is a risk factor for suicidal behavior, while resilience and family and social support are linked to a lower risk of suicide.
Project description:BackgroundThe pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus led to a series of containment and mitigation measures through lockdowns, social distancing, and the closure of educational establishments, which have had a profound impact on the mental health of the adolescent population.ObjectiveThe main objective of the present study has been to identify the sociodemographic and mental health variables related to suicidal ideation, planning, and attempts in young people participating in outpatient intervention projects within the Chilean protection network since the onset of the pandemic and the strictest lockdowns.MethodThe study's sample consists of 125 young people aged 14 to 18 years (M = 15.65; SD = 1.22), participating in outpatient intervention projects within the National Service for Minors (SENAME)/Better Childhood protection network. Through a self-report survey, the young participants provided responses on sociodemographic variables and suicidal behaviour (ideation, planning, and attempts).Results29.9% of the participants reported suicidal ideation during the onset of the pandemic and the established lockdowns; 29.2% reported having devised a plan to do so, and 18.2% indicated having attempted suicide during the evaluated period. A higher occurrence of suicidal behaviour was observed in females, sexual minorities, respondents over 15 years old, and respondents presenting depressive symptoms.ConclusionsThe Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on suicidal behaviour among the adolescent population served by the protection network in Chile. The prior violation of their rights may have contributed to the issue, particularly affecting young females in late adolescence with indicators of depression, who require specialized intervention due to the high risk detected.
Project description:BackgroundStudying the impact of COVID-19 on mental health is both compelling and imperative for the health care system's preparedness development. Discovering how pandemic conditions and governmental strategies and measures have impacted mental health is a challenging task. Mental health issues, such as depression and suicidal tendency, are traditionally explored through psychological battery tests and clinical procedures. To address the stigma associated with mental illness, social media is used to examine language patterns in posts related to suicide. This strategy enhances the comprehension and interpretation of suicidal ideation. Despite easy expression via social media, suicidal thoughts remain sensitive and complex to comprehend and detect. Suicidal ideation captures the new suicidal statements used during the COVID-19 pandemic that represents a different context of expressions.ObjectiveIn this study, our aim was to detect suicidal ideation by mining textual content extracted from social media by leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques.MethodsThe work was divided into 2 major phases, one to classify suicidal ideation posts and the other to extract factors that cause suicidal ideation. We proposed a hybrid deep learning-based neural network approach (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers [BERT]+convolutional neural network [CNN]+long short-term memory [LSTM]) to classify suicidal and nonsuicidal posts. Two state-of-the-art deep learning approaches (CNN and LSTM) were combined based on features (terms) selected from term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), Word2vec, and BERT. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) was used to extract key factors that contribute to suicidal ideation in order to provide a reliable and sustainable solution.ResultsOf 348,110 records, 3154 (0.9%) were selected, resulting in 1338 (42.4%) suicidal and 1816 (57.6%) nonsuicidal instances. The CNN+LSTM+BERT model achieved superior performance, with a precision of 94%, a recall of 95%, an F1-score of 94%, and an accuracy of 93.65%.ConclusionsConsidering the dynamic nature of suicidal behavior posts, we proposed a fused architecture that captures both localized and generalized contextual information that is important for understanding the language patterns and predict the evolution of suicidal ideation over time. According to Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) XAI algorithms, there was a drift in the features during and before COVID-19. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new features have been added, which leads to suicidal tendencies. In the future, strategies need to be developed to combat this deadly disease.
Project description:To understand and analyse the global impact of COVID-19 on outpatient services, inpatient care, elective surgery, and perioperative colorectal cancer care, a DElayed COloRectal cancer surgery (DECOR-19) survey was conducted in collaboration with numerous international colorectal societies with the objective of obtaining several learning points from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on our colorectal cancer patients which will assist us in the ongoing management of our colorectal cancer patients and to provide us safe oncological pathways for future outbreaks.