Parents Often Unaware of Adolscents ’ Suicidal Ideation, Study Shows

Parents are often unaware that their adolescent children are thinking about suicide or death, according to areport in the journalPediatrics. Moreover, when parents do believe their children are having such thoughts, the children often deny them.Given these findings, it is apparent that brief screens used at routine checkups are not detecting many adolescents at risk for suicide, wrote Jason D. Jones, Ph.D., of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children ’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This highlights the urgent need for continued training of pediatric primary care physicians in the evaluation and management of suicidal ideation and the importance of collecting information from multiple informants and rectifying discrepant reports.”Jones and colleagues analyzed data on more than 5,000 adolescents and their parents or stepparents from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. The latter is aresearch initiative combining genetic, neurodevelopmental, neuroimaging, and behavioral data on more than 9,000 adolescents aged 11 to 21 recruited from a large pediatric health network.During a computerized, structured clinical interview, adolescents were asked these questions: “Have you ever thought about killing yourself?” and “Have you ever thought a lot about death or dying?” Parents answered the same questions about their adolescents’ suicidal thoughts and thoughts of death.Half of all parents were unaware of their adolescents ’ suicidal thoughts, an...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: adolescent risk for suicide parent child agreement about risk for suicide pediatrics Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort Source Type: research