Reacción a "Mondays and New Year's Day have a higher risk of suicide, says international study"

Suicide is a serious social and public health problem, estimated to cause the death of at least 720,000 people worldwide each year and a much larger number of those affected, including those who have suffered the irreparable loss of a loved one. In Spain last year at least 3,952 people died as a result of suicide, a figure that hides tragedies that no statistic can fully reflect.

Suicidal thoughts and behaviour and mortality from suicide particularly affect those suffering from certain mental disorders such as depression, psychosis or addictions, so an effective suicide prevention policy must include improving the detection and treatment of mental health problems that pose a greater risk of suicide. We also know that suicidal behaviours do not depend exclusively on individual characteristics that can be modified with clinical interventions, but are also associated with environmental and social determinants that require a public health approach that goes beyond a purely health care response.

Suicide mortality is known to be higher at certain times of the year and may be unevenly distributed across days of the week. The heterogeneous distribution of suicide deaths could be due to factors such as changes in atmospheric temperature or the length of day and night - which affect our biology and may modify the expression of some diseases - as well as to social or cultural factors that vary between countries. To better assess these temporal patterns in suicide mortality, the authors of the study published in the BMJ analysed data on more than 1.7 million fatal suicides recorded between 1971 and 2019 in 740 locations in 26 different countries. The researchers were able to find that, despite other important differences in the temporal patterns of suicide mortality between countries, there was a significant increase in the number of fatal suicides on Mondays compared to other weekdays, and lower proportions of deaths on weekends. An increase in fatal suicides was also observed on New Year's Day in most of the countries included in the study.

Beyond providing some interesting data on a serious problem such as suicide, the results of this study are of interest because they highlight the role of its social determinants. The authors outline some of the factors that could explain why there are more suicides on Mondays and New Year's Day, such as the ‘broken promise effect’ that many people experience when they are re-exposed to the stressful conditions of working life at the end of the weekend or after failing to keep the good resolutions that often mark the end of the year. Increased alcohol use and other variables strongly associated with suicide such as lack of social support and gender differences may also contribute to explain the temporal variations in mortality that this study seems to confirm.