Filipino Americans have lower suicide rates than other Asian ethnic groups. The present study examined risk factors for suicide ideation and attempt among Filipino Americans with random forest. The data were from the Filipino American Community Epidemiological Study (Takeuchi, 2011). The results showed that the important predictors for suicide ideation were depressive disorder, substance use disorder, and years in the United States. The important predictors for suicide attempt were the number of family relatives and family conflict. Clinicians are advised to investigate familial and cultural factors among Filipino Americans. How family and cultural factors may affect suicidal behaviors were further discussed.

Previous studies have shown that multiple factors predict suicidal behavior in Asian Americans but have provided little guidance on how to rate the relative impact of these risks. To increase our understanding of suicide in Asian Americans, recursive partitioning analysis was used to identify risk factors most relevant to predicting suicidal behaviors and enhance the decision-making process of clinicians faced with clients presenting with multiple risk factors. Using a classification and regression tree (CART) and random forest analyses, we examined the role of previously identified correlates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in 2,095 Asian Americans from the National Latino and Asian American Study (Alegria et al., 2008). Random forest analysis showed that depressive and anxiety disorder were the best predictors of lifetime suicidal ideation, followed by family conflict and family cohesion. The model correctly classified lifetime suicidal ideation with moderate sensitivity (72%) and specificity (76%). CART analysis found that family conflict predicted suicide attempts in more than half of the individuals with suicidal ideation. Of those who reported low family conflict, 73% attempted suicide if they had low family support. Perceived discrimination was the next best predictor of suicide attempts (63%) when family issues were not a problem. Cross-validation of this model had moderate sensitivity (75%) but low specificity (39%). These findings highlight the importance of considering family relationship when assessing suicide risk in Asian Americans.

This brief report used the mortality data to separately examine suicide rates of the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. In 2000, Japanese American men (13.8 per 100,000) showed significantly higher suicide rate than Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese American men (7.3, 4.0, and 6.1 per 100,000), whereas Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women (3.7, 3.9, and 4.3 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian women (1.2 per 100,000). In 2010, Korean and Japanese American men (19.9 and 15.7 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than men of other Asian groups. Korean and Japanese American women (8.1 and 5.0 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian and Filipino American women (1.5 and 1.8 per 100,000). The findings challenge the notion that Asian Americans are at low risk for suicide and underscore the importance of examining ethnic variation in suicide behaviors among Asian Americans.