Suicide Attempts in Preadolescent Child Psychiatry Inpatients

Abstract
This paper describes a preliminary study examining the relative power of measures of perceived family support, hopelessness, and depression for the classification of suicide attempters and nonattempters in a series of 8‐ to 13‐year‐old psychiatric inpatients. Results of a stepwise discriminant‐function analysis indicated that a measure of a child's perceived family support discriminated between suicide attempters and nonattempters with an 88% accuracy rate. The addition of measures of hopelessness and depression at later steps did not lead to improved classification. The results are interpreted as providing strong support for a link between suicide attempts in children and perceptions of low family support.

This publication has 11 references indexed in Scilit: