Investigating Suicidal Thoughts and Attempts among Medical Staff during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

One of the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic was the occurrence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among people, especially the medical staff. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of investigating suicidal thoughts and attempts among the treatment staff.

The present systematic review was performed in relation to the thoughts and attempts of suicide of the treatment staff in April 2023, using search engines SID, Magiran, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, PubMed, Springer, and Scopus, and also keywords Suicide, Treatment staff, Health care workers, Nurses, Physicians, COVID-19, Coronavirus, and their Persian equivalents. A number of 10 articles were reviewed.

The results of this study showed that suicidal thoughts ranged from 6.31 to 15.81 percent, and attempted suicide among the treatment staff ranged from 10.8 to 11.1 percent. Factors such as poor mental health, low sleep, high stress, low support, low self-confidence, use of psychoactive drugs, income worries, loneliness, social isolation, childlessness, stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, depression, anxiety, and previous suicide attempts, were among the most important predictors of suicide attempts.

The results of this research, while emphasizing the growth of awareness in the field of causes and methods of suicide among the medical staff, point out to the necessity of this issue that managers and planners of health and medical organizations have to take basic steps in order to formulate suicide prevention policies in epidemics.