As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world, we are starting to see the first waves of epidemiological data1,2 and know that it disproportionately impacts older adults.3 However, with this still being a new and rapidly evolving global crisis, there is currently very little known about its broader impact on mental health. Clinicians are gaining early experiences around a range of issues that are highly relevant to the mental health care of older adults4 in the context of COVID-19. Retrospective studies of the 2003 SARS epidemic found that rates of suicide among older adults spiked during the period of the epidemic.
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Vahia et al. (2020) studied this question.
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