Children who lose a parent to suicide are more prone to die the same way, a new study has found.
The study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Children's Center also showed that losing a parent to suicide increases kids' risk of developing a range of major psychiatric disorders.
"Losing a parent to suicide at an early age emerges as a catalyst for suicide and psychiatric disorders. However, it's likely that developmental, environmental and genetic factors all come together, most likely simultaneously, to increase risk," said lead author Holly C. Wilcox, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Hopkins Children's.
The current study looked at the entire Swedish population over 30 years, making it the largest one to date to analyze the effects of untimely and/or sudden parental death on childhood development.
U.S. and Swedish investigators compared suicides, psychiatric hospitalizations and violent crime convictions over 30 years in more than 500,000 Swedish children, teens and young adults (under the age of 25) who lost a parent to suicide, illness or an accident, on one hand, and in nearly four million children, teens and young adults with living parents, on the other.