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A family from Illinois spoke out after a man and father of two took his own life and said he did it because of ‘COVID psychosis’. Morris’s Ben Price committed suicide 16 days after being diagnosed with COVID-19 in February. The 48-year-old farmer and married father of two spent four days in hospital with breathing problems, and then another person came home, widow Jennifer Price told WGN. “He just ran through the house and repeated things. And it wasn’t even in his normal tone of voice,” she says. “He just kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry, I’m just so scared. “He would stare out the window and just worry about things that didn’t even happen. “He prescribed medication that was meant to calm him down, but died of suicide shortly afterwards. “Our Ben would never have left us,” Price says. But “he was not our Ben.”
Doctors have described rare cases of psychosis after COVID-19. “Indeed, it appears that COVID-19 may have a two-way relationship with mental illness, whereby the experience of mental illness increases the risk of developing COVID-19, but also the COVID-19 infection increases the risk of subsequent mental illness,” it reads. a published review last month in Advances in neurology and psychiatry. This refers to one study that found that 18% of 62,354 patients had a psychiatric diagnosis – with 5.8% representing a first diagnosis – within 90 days of COVID-19 diagnosis. But ‘the kind of neurological and cognitive problems and even emotional and psychiatric problems as part of a Covid infection’ are not fully understood, Emily Landon, an expert in infectious diseases, tells WGN. Until they are, Price wants families to be on their guard. (More on neurological symptoms here.)