Suicide Rates and Prescription of Antidepressants

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

According to the Swiss law, the study was exempt from approval by an ethics committee because all data were de-identified and publicly available.

Simone Amendola, conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, methodology, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review & editing. Martin Plöderl, conceptualization, data curation, methodology, supervision, visualization, writing—review & editing. Michael P. Hengartner, conceptualization, methodology, supervision, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review & editing. All authors approved the final version of the article.

The analysis is based on publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiological Research (CDC WONDER) (https://wonder.cdc.gov/) and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) databases (https://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/index.jsp) on suicide rates and antidepressant prescribing, respectively.

This study was pre-registered at https://osf.io/978sk/.