About a year ago, people were telling me that the psychological issues weren't that big of a deal because 2020 didn't see as big a jump in suicides as they assumed people (like me) expected.
I had no specific expectations last year, although deaths from despair were already up. What I did expect was for stuff like this to become an increasing problem because psychological damage takes time to manifest in deadly ways.
The longer the lockdowns and economic disaster created by bad policy persist, the worse these kinds of issues are going to get... and not just this year, but for years to come. I'm most worried about kids and teenagers, but I think it's affected everyone in really depressing ways.
One thing that I've been wondering is why suicides are not more common in prison, especially for the innocent ones.. Most prison terms are significantly longer than the amount of time people have been under lockdown for the pandemic. An easy explanation would be that it's simply harder to get the means necessary for suicide in prisons but some stats are still showing that suicides in prisons are higher than the national average.