No country for young women: suicides up among Japanese females
I fear that you, dear reader, may be getting slightly bored with me repeatedly bemoaning the endless masking and jabbing in Japan, so I thought I’d switch it up by writing about something different: youth suicide! I want to start by looking at a short correspondence recently published by Horita and Moriguchi in The Lancet Psychiatry: “COVID-19, young people, and suicidal behaviour”.
So what did the authors do?
We calculated the number of deaths by suicide [in Japan] for each 6 month interval for three age categories (10–14 years, 15–19 years, and 20–24 years), for both males and females. We used the Mann-Whitney test to compare deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic (from July, 2020 to June, 2022) with deaths occurring in the pre-pandemic era.
And what did they find?
We did not observe a significant change in the number of deaths in each 6 months between the pre-pandemic and pandemic eras for boys and men, however, deaths by suicide among girls and women increased significantly during the pandemic era in each age category.
So how do they interpret these findings?
The loss of human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to social lockdowns and school closures, might have had a more severe impact on women than men.
This explanation is misleading. Lockdowns and long school closures certainly affected young females more than young males in countries that had them, but Japan didn’t. Moreover, Japan’s toughest Covid measures (its unenforced “voluntary lockdown” and nationwide school closures) ended in May 2020, so they can’t explain higher suicide rates in 2021 and 2022. So what does?
Well, although Japan was one of the first countries to reopen schools, Japanese school students were forced to lead faceless and restricted existences “due to Covid” until April this year. So even in 2023, we still get headlines like this.
Unlike Horita and Moriguchi, other Japanese have explicitly linked Japan’s in-school Covid measures to increased suicides. The below example comes from a letter written by an anonymous high-school teacher which I translated in full last year.
The daily battle against Covid is exhausting the school and the students.
Last autumn [i.e., in 2021], students got vaccinated, but the side-effects were terrible. However, it was before the cold and flu season, so we expected the vaccines to be effective.
But a month later, the school had an outbreak with several tens of % of the student body infected, so Covid measures were made stricter. As a result, mental health has deteriorated, and there’s even been a suicide.
So pace Horita and Moriguchi, suicides among female Japanese school students most likely increased due to not the “loss of human contact” but rather the retarding of normal human interaction due to masks, silent lunches, etc.
Many Japanese university students, on the other hand, definitely were deprived of human contact, and uni students in Greater Tokyo had to spend two years doing lessons predominantly online. Unlike uni students in the anglosphere, Japanese uni students tend to live alone, meaning online learning and demands to refrain from socialising inevitably led to high levels of depression and loneliness, as evidenced by a survey of 7,637 university students in July 2021. Note that the sophomores would’ve started university in April 2020, meaning their entire first 15 months of uni life had been during Covid.
Respondents who said they were “depressed” accounted for 41.6 percent of students overall and 47.1 percent of those in their second year.
A total of 33.0 percent of all students and 39.2 percent of sophomores said that they feel “lonely and restless about not being connected to friends.”
These feelings led to many students thinking about doing more than just dropping out.
The survey also covered thoughts of suicide and feelings of alienation among students, with 19.5 percent of all respondents saying they “do not want to live anymore,” and 22.7 percent of sophomores answering that way.
If I’m right that the Covid measures taken by educational institutions led to higher suicides, then you’d expect to find more female students committing suicide in the large metropolises that reported more Covid cases, leading to more online classes, requests not to socialise outside of class (which were generally followed), and ever harder in-school masking. And that’s exactly what Kikuchi et al. found in their paper titled “The Unusual Increase in Suicides Among Women in Japan During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Time-series Analysis Until October 2021”. In the 6 prefectures with over 2000 reported cases per million (e.g., Tokyo, Osaka, etc.), female students committed suicide at 2.83 times the expected rate (264 vs. 93.3) compared with “only” 1.46 times the expected rate elsewhere.
I suppose a Covidian could argue that suicides were higher in places with more cases because young women’s mental health was impacted by their parents and grandparents being hospitalised with and dying from Covid. So when you think about it, stopping the spread by studying online and masking in the classroom actually prevents suicides!
The problem with this argument is that while female suicides in Japanese prefectures correlate with per capita Covid cases, they don’t correlate with per capita Covid deaths. The following comes from the paper “Exploring characteristics of increased suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan using provisional governmental data” by Okada et al.
neither SDRs [age-standardised death rate of suicide] of males+females, males, nor females were related to mortality by COVID-19. Incidence of COVID-19 was positively related to SDRs of males+females and females, but did not relate to male SDRs.
To sum up, Japanese students were stuck between a rock and a hard place during Covid: when they weren’t being made to spend long hours at home, they had to treat each other like biohazards when attending in-person education. Oh, and lots of teenagers have developed complexes about their looks thanks to 24/7 masking.
I just wish the politicians and so-called experts responsible for these outcomes were embarrassed to show their faces in public too.
Details I have observed.
Primary schools reopened May 2020 as stated, but universities did not. At least not all. My medical and nursing schools are in the classroom this school year for the first time in 4 years, 3 full school years being online. The reason I was given for primary schools being open band universities closed was that university students were expected to have learned how to study on their own while primary students have not.
But even with the open primary schools, club and other extracurricular activists were widely banned. My kid’s elementary school is STILL enforcing Mokushoku. Then we have the fact that masking by itself greatly impedes social contact.
Further, enforced of not, many of the places where young women worked before covid were closed for much of the past three years. There are articles stating the closures of bars and restaurants disproportionately affected women as more of those employed in such business as part timers were women.
A great many did follow all of the covid recommendations. I know people who put off their weddings and or honeymoons. A great many followed the “recommendation” to not cross prefectural borders. My classes are supposed to be conversation based classes. No much to talk about when few have left their apartments in weeks, months and then years. Those who ignored the school’s rules and went out and tried to have fun would not talk about their experiences out of fear of a classmate reporting them or of offending a classmate. Choosing material for class that did not focus or harder still, even mention any of the normal activities they were banned by their schools was impossible.
The lockdowns lite we endured in the greater Tokyo area were in some ways just as hard or worse than the hard lockdowns of other countries. Yes, we were allowed out of the house, but where could we go with everything closed? Once they partially reopened, everything was rationed. We had lotteries for attendance to outdoor events in the big city park that used to be “come one and all” events. Same for museums, aquariums, local music concerts. If it was allowed to be held, one needed to apply for a lottery to receive the QR code that would allow you to enter and leave events.
So we have the mask as a barrier to socializing, few if any extracurricular activities for students of any age and zoom classes for 2 or more years for many college students and no employment opportunities. All due to “recommendations”. In one school alone, I have 3 struggling students out of the two 7 student classes and two others out of a 20 person class. Another will not even provide a photo of herself unmasked for the student ID card/class participation records I make for each student. All 34 students are female. This number, 5, of students having problems is greater than all those I had experienced in the previous 17 years combined. AND, this is exactly what many warned about. There simply is no other possible outcome to this madness they put us through.
Students removing themselves by suicide helps keep the silent lunches silent. So that’s sort of a consolation for the authorities.