İndex Suicide Attempt in Adolescents: From the Perspective of İts Relationship With İmpulsivity and Negative Life Events During Childhood

Objective:

We aimed to investigate history of childhood trauma, impulsivity and type of suicide behavior of adolescents that had applied to our unit due to their index suicide attempts.

Method:

Adolescents between 15 to 18 years old that had been transfered to the hospital’s intensive care unit due to attempted suicide were evaluated by child and adolescent psychiatrists, that constituted the research team for this study. Sociodemographic features, cause of the suicide attempt and scores of Childhood trauma questionnaire (CTQ) and Barrat impulsivity scale applied to the participants were analyzed.

Results:

48 girls (mean age 16±1.1) and 6 boys (mean age16±0.7) were included. Most common causes for attempted suicide were; depression (52.1%), problems in romantic relationship with the signifi cant other and feelings of hopelessness (29.2%), being sexually abused (12.5%) and academic failure (6.3%) in girls; where as for boys, most commonly indicated causes of attempted suicide were depression (83.3%) and problems in the romantic relationship with the signifi cant other (16.7%). Rate of impulsive suicide attempt was 37.5% for girls and 50% for boys. Girls had higher total CTQ , physical and emotional abuse scores, compared to boys. As for the relationship between unplanned suicide attempts, impulsivity and types of neglect or abuse, we have found that positive history for emotional neglect was inversely correlated with attention defi ciency and motor impulsivity. It was also found that adolescents with the history of planned suicide attempts scored higher in questionnaires that had assessed presence of an emotional or sexual abuse, and specifi cally, history of emotional abuse would create an increase in planned suicide attempts.

Discussion:

Through our study, we tried to elaborate the possible link between childhood trauma, planned suicide attempts and impulsivity, within our clinical sample. Further studies in future that would be conducted with larger clinical and community samples arewarranted to support our fi ndings and highlight otherpossible risk factors linked to suicide behavior.