Psy-World

Children who experience adversities are at a greater risk for suicidal behaviour throughout life.

Some studies have shown that adversities are associated with subsequent onset of suicidal behaviour, however the extent to which childhood adversities might predict suicidal behaviour over time has not been investigated. Therefore the associations between childhood adversities and the onset and persistence of suicidal behavior were studied by evaluating data from the World Mental Health surveys from 21 countries. A total of 55,299 participants were interviewed about their childhood and whether they had experienced any physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, parental death, parent divorce, other parental loss, family violence, physical illness, and financial adversity before the age of 18 years. Core diagnostic assessments of mental disorders were also made at that time, and the Composite International Diagnostic Interview 3.0 was used to assess lifetime suicidal behavior. There were 12.2% of the subjects who had experienced the death of a parent, 8% had been the victim of physical abuse, and 6.9% had experienced family violence. A total of 2.7% reported at least 1 suicide attempt, and 9.4% said they had thought about killing themselves. Among those who had tried to kill themselves, 29.3% had been the victim of physical abuse, 24.8% had experienced family violence, and 14.5% had been sexually abused. In both bivariate and multivariate models, the childhood adversities were associated with an increased risk for suicide attempt and ideation (odd ratio [OR] range, 1.2 - 5.7). In the bivariate models, physical and sexual abuse had the highest odds for suicide attempts (OR, 3.7 and 5.7, respectively) and for suicide ideation (OR, 2.7 and 3.4, respectively). After additional adjustment for respondents' lifetime mental disorder status the associations remained similar. These data that indicate that childhood adversities (and especially sexual and physical abuse) were most predictive of suicidal behaviour have important implications in the context of the prevention of suicide worldwide. Bruffaerts R, Demyttenaere K, Borges G, Haro JM, Chiu WT, Hwang I, Karam EG, Kessler RC, Sampson N, Alonso J, Andrade LH, Angermeyer M, Benjet C, Bromet E, de Girolamo G, de Graaf R, Florescu S, Gureje O, Horiguchi I, Hu C, Kovess V, Levinson D, Posada-Villa J, Sagar R, Scott K, Tsang A, Vassilev SM, Williams DR, Nock MK (2010). Childhood adversities as risk factors for onset and persistence of suicidal behaviour. Br J Psychiatry 197:20-27. Updated August 2010