“In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide: Evidence from School Calendars and Pandemic School Closures”, Benjamin Hansen, Joseph J. Sabia, Jessamyn Schaller2022-12 (, )⁠:

[Twitter] This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document 3 key findings:

  1. using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990–292019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar.

    Figure 2: Monthly Suicide Rate Per 100,000 Population, 1990–292019.

    We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September.

  2. we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020.

    Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the US and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction.

    Figure 5: Historic Seasonality of Suicides 1990–292019 vs. 2020. Notes: Based on estimates and 95% CIs of the differences in suicide rates for calendar month of the year from <a href=Poisson regression models using suicides from 1990–292019. January is the omitted baseline category. All models control for county fixed and year fixed effects, and cluster at the state level. Population × Days in a month is used as an exposure variable.” />
    Figure 5: Historic Seasonality of Suicides 1990–292019 vs. 2020. Notes: Based on estimates and 95% CIs of the differences in suicide rates for calendar month of the year from Poisson regression models using suicides from 1990–292019. January is the omitted baseline category. All models control for county fixed and year fixed effects, and cluster at the state level. Population × Days in a month is used as an exposure variable.

  3. using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with +12–18% teen suicides.

    This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25.

Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.

…Less well-known is that teen suicides consistently rise during the academic year, consistent with the hypothesis that depression and stress related to time in school may lead to increases in suicide risk for youth.

…Hansen & Lang2011 were the first to identify that youth suicides consistently decrease in summer months and (to a lesser extent) over December holidays, while suicides for young adults remain unchanged. They find the seasonal decline in suicides is evident for every region of the United States and is evident in recession and booms. They investigate several potential causes including seasonal affective disorder (SAD), economic conditions, and geography. One possibility that Hansen & Lang2011 are unable to rule out is that time spent in school could be an important contributing factor to teen suicide: a deeper investigation into the association between school attendance and teen suicides has been hampered by the lack of exogenous variation in school calendars. School calendars are remarkably stable over time and the lack of national reporting of school calendars presents a challenge in identifying plausibly exogenous shocks to school starting dates.

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In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide: Evidence from School Calendars and Pandemic School Closures