Hi, for this special edition, short episode, I was talking with Dr. Michael Cummings and

we were having a discussion on nortriptylene, actually, and in the middle of it, we kind

of had a digression talking about suicidality in the current pandemic and this sort of

sub epidemic of suicidality that's going on, specifically suicidal thoughts are spiking

across every demographic due to the loss of connection to usual psychosocial supports,

normal activities, and in a lot of cases, jobs, the loss of jobs leading to a significant

financial stress. These stressors compound and massively impact the mental resiliency

of everyone reached by this pandemic. The hardest hit demographic is the unpaid caregivers

and essential workers. And we'll be talking about this more in this micro episode. I hope

this is something that has been helpful. Up until this point, actually, there was a systemic

review that was released June 7, 2020 before the CDC report and they found no evidence

of increased suicide, self-harm, suicidal behaviors, suicidal thoughts, and they looked

at a ton of studies to get this data. So this study that came out August 14, 2020

by the CDC titled Mental Health Substance Use Suicidolidation during the COVID-19 pandemic

really was a first sort of big survey that looked at the increased risk of suicidality.

This was a study of 5,412 adults. It was a web-based survey done by Qualtrics. So here

we go. You know, and to bring this to the current time that we're in, I don't know if you

saw that recent CDC document that came out August 17th, but they talked about how the suicide,

suicidal thoughts is going way up. And the percentage in this group that they looked at,

it's like a lot higher than I would have expected. What do you think?

Yeah, this pandemic is putting enormous stresses on people, certainly financial stress,

loss of stability, being simply confined and unable to access usual social supports. All

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