Suicide rates actually decrease when the general death rate in a society rises.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Why do suicide rates increase in the spring and decrease in the fall? Insights from Canadian suicide rate and death rate data spanning 2010 to 2020
PsyArXiv · aj7bz_v7
The Takeaway
Analyzing a decade of data, researchers found an inverse relationship: when more people are dying from natural causes (like in winter or during a pandemic), suicide becomes rarer. This supports a 1950s theory that the perceived 'value of life' shifts when death is more common.
From the abstract
In 1952, the psychiatrist Erwin Stengel hypothesized that suicide becomes rarer in times when the value of life within a society is lower, when death is more common. In Canada, suicide rates and death rates present with consistent seasonality between years, fluctuating inversely with one another. However, the typical pre-pandemic seasonality seen in death rates was broken during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a consequence of inordinate deaths occurring at an odd time of year. This