In Western societies, 3 percent to 4 percent of children experience the death of a parent and it is one of the most stressful and potentially harmful life events in childhood<\/strong>. While most children and adolescents adapt to the loss, others develop preventable social and psychological problems.<\/p>\n Mai-Britt Guldin, Ph.D., of Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues used nationwide register data from 1968 to 2008 in Denmark, Sweden and Finland (for a total of 7.3 million individuals) to identify 189,094 children (2.6 percent) who had a parent die before the child turned 18 (the bereaved group)<\/strong>. For comparison, the authors matched those bereaved children with 10 other children (n=1.89 million children) who did not have a parent die to examine the long-term risks of suicide after parental death (the reference group). Both groups were followed for up to 40 years.<\/p>\n Authors report 265 individuals from the bereaved group (0.14 percent) who lost a parent during childhood and 1,342 individuals from the reference group (0.07 percent) who did not lose a parent during childhood died from suicide during follow-up. During 25 years of follow-up, the absolute risk of suicide was 4 in 1,000 persons for boys who experienced parental death in childhood and 2 in 1,000 persons for girls<\/strong>. The risk for suicide was high for children whose parent died of suicide but also high for children whose parent died of other causes, according to the results.<\/p>\n The authors note their register-based study had no information on important risk factors including genetic factors, social network and family lifestyle factors.<\/p>\n “Our study points to the early mitigation of distress to reduce the risk of suicidal behavior among children<\/strong> who had a parent who died during childhood,” the study concludes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the The JAMA Network Journals\u00a0media release: The death of a parent in childhood was associated with a long-term risk of suicide in a study of children from three Scandinavian… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[345,349,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18496,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18192\/revisions\/18496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"sad](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/sad-child.jpg\")
<\/a>The death of a parent in childhood was associated with a long-term risk of suicide in a study of children from three Scandinavian countries who were followed for up to 40 years<\/strong>, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry<\/em>.<\/p>\n