A man in England committed suicide because he could not cope with self-isolation during the coronavirus, according to his family.
Daniel Furniss, 34, suffered from bipolar disorder and had been struggling with social distancing rules before he took his own life last week.
“There is not enough guidance for people with mental health issues,” he posted on social media before his death.
The Hampshire County man had long suffered with mental illness before the pandemic, but his sister Chelsea Furniss told reporters she hopes her brother’s death will raise awareness of people struggling with mental health issues during stay-at-home orders.
“He lived on his own but would go out every day. Dan had diabetes and was classed as a high-risk person, so after lockdown he was unable to go out, which we think pushed him over the edge,” she said, according to Yahoo News UK.
“More could be done to help people who are struggling while self-isolating. Hopefully what’s happened with Dan can raise awareness of these issues,” she said.
Furniss’s death follows other suicides around the world that have been linked to the coronavirus. A finance minister in Germany took his own life over financial fears regarding the coronavirus in March. Additionally, more people died of suicide in a single Tennessee county over one week than of the coronavirus across the entire state.
President Trump has been eager to reopen the American economy, in part to quell people’s anxieties over lack of work and social interaction.
“You have tremendous responsibility. We have jobs. We have … people get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death probably in far greater numbers than the numbers we are talking about with regard to the virus,” Trump said in March.
The president later extended federal social distancing guidelines until April 30 to mitigate the spread of the virus, which has infected more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
