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Suicide is a major public health concern, media can influence its awareness, contagion, and prevention. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and suicide in media coverage through Natural Language Processing analysis (NPL).

To study how suicide is depicted in news media, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data techniques were used to analyze news and tweets, to extract or classify the topic to which they belonged.

A granger causality analysis showed with significant p-value that an increase in covid news at the beginning of the pandemic explains a later rise in suicide-related news. An analysis based on correlation and structural causal models show a strong relationship between the appearance of subjects “health” and “covid”, and also between “covid” and “suicide”.

Our analysis also uncovers that the inclusion of …