Risk Factors for Suicide Attempts among Korean Adolescents

Abstract

This study examined the rate of suicide attempts and relevant variables and identified risk factors for suicide attempts among Korean adolescents. A cross-sectional study was performed using an anonymous, self-report questionnaire. A total of 2,100 Korean adolescents, including 1,321 student adolescents and 779 delinquent adolescents, were selected using a proportional stratified random sampling method for this study. The results showed the rate of suicide attempts to be 11.6%, with delinquent adolescents reporting a higher rate of suicide attempts than student adolescents. Adolescent suicide attempts indicated higher levels of dysfunctional family dynamics and maladaptive personalities. In addition, adolescents who attempted suicide expressed a significantly lower level of life satisfaction and less effective coping strategies compared with those adolescents who had not attempted suicide. Logistic regression analysis revealed that five predictive risk factors appeared to be statistically significant: coping strategy, parental child-rearing pattern, depression, parent-child relationship, and psychosomatic symptoms, in this order at p < 0.05.

Suicidal Ideation, Parent–Child Relationships, and Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Cross-Validation Study Using a Graphical Markov Model

“…Depression has formerly been identified as a predictor of suicide attempts [36] and we found strong support for the hypothesis that depression leads to suicidal ideation. Depression is the strongest predictor of suicidal ideation; the amount of 30% of the variance explained in the logistic regression means that the contribution of depression is high, indeed.…”

Family Factors Associated With Suicide Attempts Among Chinese Adolescent Students: A National Cross-Sectional Survey

“…These family variables are therefore generally risk factors of suicidal behavior during adolescence, which is similar to most previous reports showing adolescent suicide attempters often suffer from a greater dysfunctional family dynamic environment than nonattempters [8,12,[20][21][22].…”

“…This is relatively lower than the results of surveillance of adolescents in many other countries, where 4.6%-13.2% of students reported suicide attempts [11][12][13][14]. Moreover, the rate of suicide attempt in this study is lower than international means identified by Evans et al [2].…”

“…The prevalence rates vary among different population. For example, a cross-sectional Malaysian school survey showed that Malay adolescents had lower rate of suicide attempts than Indian and Chinese [13], whereas Kim and Kim found that delinquent adolescents reported a higher rate of suicide attempts than student adolescents [12]. Furthermore, variation in findings may be partly explained by differences in designs and definition of suicide attempts.…”

Prevalence of suicide attempts among Chinese adolescents: A meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies

“…In America, West et al [68] assessed the prevalence of suicide behaviors using data from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey for students in grades 9-12, and found that the prevalence of suicide attempts was 6.9%. Another cross-sectional study among Korean adolescents revealed that the prevalence of suicide attempts was up to 11.6% [72]. These results were higher than that of our study.…”