Japan's long Covid: child suicides remain high in 2023

Just in case the winter weather wasn’t depressing enough, the Japanese government has released the provisional suicide statistics for 2023. The overall numbers show the Covid-era reverse in the previous downward trend is now into its fourth year, with 21,818 suicides in 2023 compared with 20,169 in 2019.

Suicides per year. Blue: males. Pink: females.

One of the most notorious adverse effects of Japan’s Covid response has been the large increase in suicides among school students. And even though the national government told schools they no longer needed to force their students to wear masks or eat in silence from April, the bluntest tool for measuring the nationwide mental health of Japanese children hasn’t got much better. There were 507 suicides among school-aged children in 2023 compared with 399 in 2019 despite the number of school-aged children declining.

Suicides per year among elementary, junior high, and high school students.

So why are Japanese kids still killing themselves in higher numbers than in the 2010s? Let’s ask the experts.

According to an analyst from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), “Due to continued Covid restrictions deepening isolation, an increasing number of children may be suffering from interpersonal relationship problems.”

I’m pretty sure that should be “Due to continued Covid restrictions that we advocated”, but this semi-candor is better than the MHLW’s usual dishonesty on Covid-related issues.

The managing director of Tokyo’s Childline Support Center has a similar opinion: “Due to class closures and refraining from going out due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, an increasing number of children have been unable to adequately learn how to form relationships with those around them and are spending their time feeling strained.”

I’m one of the last people on earth who’d ever defend the Covid school closures, but these opinions make no sense. The only time schools were closed for long was March-May 2020. Why would this have any effect on suicides in 2021, 2022, or 2023? And since May/June 2020, Japanese kids have been in sat in 20- to 30-person classes five days a week, so how have they become more isolated and less able to form friendships?

I suppose the obvious answer would be that even though the kids were in school, they couldn’t see each others’ faces and had to eat like inmates at a maximum security prison. It takes an active imagination to think that the school closures and stay-home requests in spring 2020 are causing more kids to take their own lives in 2023, but you don’t need a PhD in child psychology to think that making teenagers spend over three years in a faceless world like the one below might not be great for their mental health or relationship-building skills.

Source

So the experts and I agree the Covid response caused the approx 25% rise in suicides among school kids that has now lasted for four years; we just disagree on which part to blame.

Moreover, lifting the in-school Covid rules didn’t reduce the mental health burden on Japan’s youth as much as might have been hoped since many school kids, especially girls, had developed mask dependency and complexes about their looks and so have kept masking.

This mess was summed up before the restrictions were lifted by child psychiatrist Arisa Yamaguchi from the National Center for Child Health and Development.

“If we suddenly force children to take off their masks, some children may suffer the same degree of psychological damage as they did when we suddenly ordered them to start wearing them three years ago.”

The rate of youth suicides in Japan was already at record highs even before Covid, but rather than prioritise trying to bring more kids back from the edge, the government pushed more kids over it by making school life even more miserable for mentally vulnerable students.

So what are the authorities doing to bring youth suicides down? According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, “As preventive measures, the government will expand consultation services using SNS and promote `education on how to issue an SOS' taught in schools on how to seek advice when worried.”

I suppose offering a weak fire-fighting service is the least an unrepentant arsonist can do.