Michiko Ueda

From late December 2019, a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) spread rapidly to countries throughout the world. In the absence of a vaccine, and given the high degree of transmissibility and potential lethality of COVID-19, social and physical distancing, including reducing/avoiding crowding, the closure of non-essential businesses/services, stay-at-home orders, and local/national movement restrictions, have been the main public health measures adopted to mitigate the transmission/detrimental effects

Continuous monitoring of mental health, particularly that of the most vulnerable populations identified in this study, and appropriate suicide prevention efforts are necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A substantial amount of evidence indicates that news coverage of suicide deaths by celebrities is followed by an increase in suicide rates, suggesting a copycat behavior. However, the underlying process by which celebrity status and media coverage leads to increases in subsequent suicides is still unclear. This study collected over 1 million individual messages ("tweets") posted on Twitter that were related to 26 prominent figures in Japan who died by suicide between 2010 and 2014 and investigat

Abstract The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have detrimental mental health consequences. However, as yet, there is limited understanding of its impact on the mental health of the general population. The aim of this study is to examine the mental health of the Japanese general population by conducting the first systematic survey during the pandemic (N=1,000), with a particular focus on identifying the most vulnerable groups. Results from logistic regression analyses showed that the mental health o

Abstract Background The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented public health crisis, but its effect on suicide deaths is little understood. Methods We analyzed data from monthly suicide statistics between January 2017 and October 2020 and from online surveys on mental health filled out by the general population in Japan. Results Compared to the last three years (2017-2019), the number of suicide deaths was lower than average during the initial phase of the pandemic but excee

This study presents evidence that media reports on celebrity suicides have an immediate impact on the number of suicides in the general population. Our findings also highlight the importance of responsible and cautious media reporting on suicide.

Although numerous studies have investigated the effect of green space on mental health, as yet, little is known about the association between green space and suicide. To address this deficit, we conducted the first Japan-wide study of the relationship between green space and suicide mortality. Results from spatial analyses of municipality-level panel data for the 1975-2014 period that included 886,440 suicide deaths with a fixed-effect estimator showed that green space was associated with suicid

Different subpopulations die by suicide at different times of the day and days of the week. Time patterns of suicide varied considerably over time, suggesting that they cannot be explained by biological circadian rhythm alone. Our findings suggest that the patterns are partly explained by economic conditions. Future suicide prevention efforts should consider the time patterns of suicide unique to each subpopulation, especially when economic growth is depressed.

We studied the effects of districting on intergovernmental aid by state governments to local governments in the United States. We found that metropolitan areas receive relatively more aid when represented in the state legislature by an at‐large delegation than when divided into single‐member districts. This suggests that the free‐riding that may occur with at‐large representation is more than counterbalanced by other factors. The estimated effects are robust to the effects of other confounding f

This study establishes a framework to implement near-real-time monitoring of the emotional distress level of social media users, highlighting a great potential to continuously monitor their well-being using survey-linked social media posts as a complement to administrative and large-scale survey data. Given its flexibility and adaptability, the proposed framework is easily extendable for other purposes, such as detecting suicidality among social media users, and can be used on streaming data for