[Suicide attempts in childhood and adolescence: risk factors]

The rate of suicides among adolescents has shown a disturbing increase during the last decades, becoming one of the most important issues in child and adolescent psychiatry. Suicide attempts increase steadily with age, especially among girls, who grossly out-number boys in the number of attempted suicides. However, clinicians face a difficult dilemma in identifying those children who are at the greatest risk for medically serious suicide attempts. This paper presents the results of the risk factors studied in 30 children and adolescents who have made suicide attempts compared to a matched control group. A broken home or loss of the father, alcoholism, disturbed upbringing and family relationships, previous suicide attempts, school failure and social isolation of the family were among the risk factors most frequently present.