COVID-19 and Suicide
8/15 2025
Author: Ayako Wakano
COVID-19 and its immediate impact on suicide cases in Japan
The suicide rate in Japan is remarkably high. According to the White Paper on Suicide Countermeasures 2020 which is annually published by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, it is the highest suicide rate among G7 countries and is ranked fourth among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, in April 2020, the labor market faced such a tremendous shock as a result of the government’s request for the public to exercise self-restraint in going out and for businesses to shorten business hours. Numerous studies have pointed out that the pandemic and accompanying social restrictions were strongly associated with mental health consequences.
However, the suicide rate among Japanese men significantly decreased compared with the previous five years. Figure [1] shows the decrease in the suicide rate for men from January to December of 2020 compared with January of each base year. The monthly suicide rate for men in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures, publicly open in the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare website, was regressed on the month dummies of 2020 and the base year with a prefecture-level fixed effect. The coefficients of month dummies with confidence intervals are shown in Figure [1]. When the base year was set to 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, or 2019, the suicide rate in 2020 for men in April, May, and June decreased significantly compared with the same month of the previous years.
When looking at cohabitation status as shown in Figure [2], for those with family members, it is more apparent that the monthly number of suicide cases significantly decreased, compared to the year 2019. On the other hand, for those alone, the reduction in number is small. Although this is the number of monthly suicide cases, we need to be careful in reading the graph, as the population might differ in year 2019 January to each month. Japan is not the only country to see these changes in the suicide rate during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study by Lantos and Nyari (2024) examined the suicide trends of 27 European Countries and found that the suicide rate did not increase from 2019 to 2020.
Although an immediate rise in suicide cases following the spread of COVID-19 was not observed as expected, it remains important to continue monitoring the situation closely.
(Lantos and Nyári 2024)
Lantos, Tamás, and Tibor András Nyári. 2024. “The Impact of the First Year of COVID-19 Pandemic on Suicides in a Collection of 27 EU-Related Countries.” Scientific Reports 14 (1): 17671. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-68604-3.