The Impact of Parental Status on the Risk of Completed Suicide

Ping Qin · Preben Bo Mortensen

242 citations0/0 files storedArchives of General Psychiatry

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Suicide and Self-Harm Studies Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Although some studies suggest that parenthood is associated with a reduced suicide risk, the impact of children on parental suicide has rarely been documented. METHODS: This study investigates the impact of parental status on the risk of completed suicide in the context of other risk factors. A nested case-control design is used, matching for age, sex, and calendar time. The study is based on 4 Danish longitudinal registers, including 18 611 suicides of individuals aged 18 to 75 years from January 1, 1981, to December 31, 1997, and 372 220 matched control subjects. Information about children and subject's individual background is retrieved and merged. Data are analyzed using conditional logistic regression, yielding odds ratios interpreted as incidence rate ratios. RESULTS: The presence of children is protective against suicide in parents in terms of having children and, to a higher degree, having a young child; these effects exist even when adjusted for marital, socioeconomic, and psychiatric status; and their influences are much stronger in women than in men. At the same time, parents of children with a hospitalized psychiatric disorder and parents of children who have died are at an increased risk for suicide. A child dying during early childhood has a strong effect on suicide in parents, and a suicidal death of a child increases the risk of parental suicide more than a nonsuicidal death. The suicide risk is particularly high in the first month after losing a child. CONCLUSIONS: The impact of children on parental suicide can be protective because of having children. It can also be negative, for example, when losing a child, particularly if the child dies during early childhood; the risk is particularly high during the first month after the loss.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 242 citations exist upstream.

References

1983Reasons for staying alive when you are thinking of killing yourself: The Reasons for Living Inventory.1997The Danish Psychiatric Central Register.1996Psychosocial Risk Factors of Child and Adolescent Completed Suicide 1997IDENTIFICATION OF SUICIDE RISK FACTORS USING EPIDEMIOLOGIC STUDIES 2000Sex and suicide 1985Psychological autopsy of completed suicide in children and adolescents 2001Is Suicide Bereavement Different? A Reassessment of the Literature 2000Gender differences in risk factors for suicide in Denmark

Cited by

2016Bereavement by suicide as a risk factor for suicide attempt: a cross-sectional national UK-wide study of 3432 young bereaved adults 2012Suicide risk assessment in clinical practice: Pragmatic guidelines for imperfect assessments.2021Contributing factors to suicide: Political, social, cultural and economic 2008Suicidal Ideation in College Students Varies Across Semesters: The Mediating Role of Belongingness 2005Midlife suicide risk, partner’s psychiatric illness, spouse and child bereavement by suicide or other modes of death: a gender specific study

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.