Long COVID’s link to suicide: scientists warn of hidden crisis

CHICAGO/LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Scott Taylor never got to move on from COVID-19.

The 56-year-old, who caught the disease in spring 2020, still had not recovered about 18 months later when he killed himself at his home near Dallas, having lost his health, memory and money.

“No one cares. No one wants to take the time to listen,” Taylor wrote in a final text to a friend, speaking of the plight of millions of sufferers of long COVID, a disabling condition that can last for months and years after the initial infection.

“I can hardly do laundry without complete exhaustion, pain, fatigue, pain all up and down my spine. World spinning dizzily, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. It seems I say stuff and have no idea of what I’m saying,” Taylor added.

Long COVID is a complex medical condition that can be hard to diagnose as it has a range of more than 200 symptoms – some of which can resemble other illnesses – from exhaustion and cognitive impairment to pain, fever and heart palpitations, according to the World Health Organization.

There is no authoritative data on the frequency of suicides among sufferers. Several scientists from organizations including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Britain’s data-collection agency are beginning to study a potential link following evidence of increased cases of depression and suicidal thoughts among people with long COVID, as well as a growing number of known deaths.

“I’m sure long COVID is associated with suicidal thoughts, with suicide attempts, with suicide plans and the risk of suicide death. We just don’t have epidemiological data,” said Leo Sher, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Health System in New York who studies mood disorders and suicidal behavior.

Among key questions now being examined by researchers: does the risk of suicide potentially increase among patients because the virus is changing brain biology? Or does the loss of their ability to function as they once did push people to the brink, as can happen with other long-term health conditions?

Sher said pain disorders in general were a very strong of predictor of suicide, as was inflammation in the brain, which several studies have linked with long COVID.

“We should take this seriously,” he added.

An analysis for Reuters conducted by Seattle-based health data firm Truveta showed that patients with long COVID were nearly twice as likely to receive a first-time antidepressant prescription within 90 days of their initial COVID diagnosis compared with people diagnosed with COVID alone.

The analysis was based on data from 20 major U.S. hospital systems, including more than 1.3 million adults with a COVID diagnosis and 19,000 with a long COVID diagnosis between May 2020 and July 2022.

‘WE DON’T KNOW THE EXTENT’

The potential long-term effects of COVID-19 are poorly understood, with governments and scientists only now starting to systematically study the area as they emerge from a pandemic that itself blindsided much of the world.

While many long COVID patients recover over time, around 15% still experience symptoms after 12 months, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). There’s no proven treatment and debilitating symptoms can leave sufferers unable to work.

The implications of long COVID potentially being linked with increased risk of mental illness and suicide are grave; in America alone, the condition has affected up to 23 million people, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated in March.

Long COVID has also pushed roughly 4.5 million out of work, equal to about 2.4% of the U.S. workforce, employment expert Katie Bach of the Brookings Institution told Congress in July.

Worldwide, nearly 150 million people are estimated to have developed long COVID during the first two years of the pandemic, according to the IHME.

In many developing countries, a lack of surveillance of long COVID makes the picture even murkier, said Murad Khan, a psychiatry professor at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, who is part of an international group of experts researching the suicide risk linked to COVID-19.

“We have a huge problem, but we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.

HITTING BREAKING POINT

Time is a scarce commodity for a growing number of long COVID sufferers who say they are running out of hope and money, according to Reuters interviews with several dozen patients, family members and disease experts.

For Taylor, who lost his job selling genomic tests to physicians in a round of layoffs in the summer of 2020, the breaking point came when his insurance coverage through his former employer was due to expire and his application for social security benefits was…