Surprising Risk Factor For Suicide

Posting Date: 11/29/1999

Original broadcast date: July 28, 1999

David Satcher, the U.S. surgeon general, has just announced that suicide is a significant public health problem in the U.S., and he is launching an effort to educate people about suicide prevention

It's the eighth leading cause of death in this country, and in 1997 claimed about 30,000 lives - by comparison, only 19,000 people died as a result of homicide.

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The most likely to kill themselves? White men 65 and older. And, sadly, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 has doubled since 1980.

In light of this, the results of a long-term English study look all the more interesting. The researchers, as reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter, have followed 3,500 people born in the same week in 1946. They were assessed for personality, intelligence, behavior, emotional stability and a variety of other characteristics before the age of 16.

By 1996, 11 of the subjects had committed suicide and in looking at those individuals, they found some interesting associations. Bed-wetting in boys at age four and behavioral problems in girls, were among them, but the most surprising was that low anxiety levels in childhood were associated with suicide.

You would expect that to be the opposite, wouldn't you? Who would think you should keep your children anxious in childhood.

Other factors were not that surprising: low academic achievement, childhood psychiatric treatment and disability in a parent were also linked to suicide.

Of course, this doesn't mean a child who experiences any of this will definitely grow up to commit suicide - but if we are looking at this as a public health problem, studies like this can provide useful information.

Source: American Family Physician, July 1999, Vol. 60, No. 1; Harvard Mental Health Letter