According to a research published the JAMA psychology, those people who were just under 18 years of age when their parents died are at a higher tendency to commit suicide.
A parent's death that was carried out from a suicide is often connected with mental health problems and increased suicidal tendencies for the bereaved child, but as for the long-term tendencies of committing suicide after an individual's parent died from other causes, few researches has been conducted about it yet.
Known as one of the most stressful and critical phases of life events in childhood, 3-4% of children in Western countries experienced how it feels like to lose a parent. Although some could cope to the pain and sadness of losing a parent, others might acquire social and psychological problems in the process.
As per Medical News Today, Mai-Britt Guldin, PhD, from Aarhus University, Denmark together with his colleagues, collected information of children from three Scandinavian countries for up to 40 years to gain a better understanding and come up with ways on how to cope with the loss and prevent suicide tendencies.
The researchers' objective was to find out if there are any differences with the factors when it comes to the risk it can bring such as the age of the child when his parents died, cause of parental death, how long has it been since the parent/s died, birth order, socioeconomic status and parental psychiatric history.
Higher risk of suicide for those who lost a parent when they were younger
25 years after the parent's death, higher suicidal tendencies for an offspring has been discovered to be connected with parental death during childhood.
As studies have been conducted, the results show that the probable risk of suicide for boys was 4 in every 1,000 person and 2 in 1,000 persons for girls who had experienced parental death in their childhood.
