Increased Risk of Suicide for Fibromyalgia Patients

Some studies come out with info that just makes us want to say “duh!”. You really needed a study to figure that out? This is one of those: Mortality in a cohort of Danish patients with fibromyalgia: Increased frequency of suicide

According to the study, suicide is still really nothing to worry about, but if that’s the case it’s nothing to worry about in general and we just just ignore that it’s a problem at all. The average suicide rate is about 1.4% and the rate of suicide for those with Fibromyalgia is just around 4.4%, but those numbers are minimal, nothing to worry about. Seriously?

It’s called depression, and yes we get depressed, it’s a side effect of chronic pain and isolation and a few other things we deal with, having Fibromyalgia.

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Is there an increased risk of suicide for Fibromyalgia patients?

Yes, but there’s also a much higher rate of depression in Fibromyalgia and chronic pain patients. When you connect those two dots it just makes sense that there would be increased rates of suicide, since there are higher rates of suicide among those who are depressed than any other group.

What about that increase in accidental deaths (the other cause of death that is increased by having Fibromyalgia); instead of 5%, Fibromyalgia increases our chances of accidental death to 7.1%. Let’s see, our brains don’t think as fast, our reaction times aren’t as good. We have a tendency to miss our steps, trip, not respond quickly enough to hit the right pedal when driving sometimes, our balance isn’t always great, we lose strength in our limbs…. and all of these without any explainable cause. Yeah, I can see where our risks of accidental death might increase a little.

Increased risk of accidents in Fibromyalgia

In my opinion, to discount these increases is to say that the risks don’t really exist for anyone and there is no cause to worry about anyone committing of suicide (to watch for the risk factors, the signs, etc and hopefully prevent it) or do anything to prevent accidental deaths in anyone. To me the attitude in this article just exacerbates the problem we see on a daily basis of Fibromyalgia being ignored and treated as a trashcan diagnosis that means nothing.