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

LONDON: Scott Taylor never got to move on from Covid-19. The 56-year-old, who caught the disease in the spring of 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 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, diarrhoea, 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 Organisation. There is no authoritative data on the frequency of suicides among sufferers.

Several scientists from organisations including the US 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, and 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 a suicide death. We just don't have epidemiological data," said Leo Sher, a psychiatrist in New York who studies mood disorders and suicidal behaviour, a British wire service reported.

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? 'We should take this seriously Sher said pain disorders in general were a very strong 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 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 US hospitals, 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.

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.