Attitudes About Adolescent Suicide: Not in My Neighborhood

In focus groups, both parents and adolescents acknowledged youth suicide as a major problem, but not in their own communities.

According to the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 14.5% of high-school students seriously thought about committing suicide during the 12 months prior to the survey. In 2006, 1771 U.S. youth aged 10 to 19 years committed suicide. To better understand youth and parent attitudes about this problem, investigators conducted semistructured focus groups with a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 66 adolescents (age range, 13–18 years; 50% female) and 30 parents from urban, rural, and suburban locations in Illinois and Kansas.

Overall, both parents and adolescents acknowledged the pervasiveness of suicide among youth as a problem but uniformly viewed it as an issue in other communities or for other racial and ethnic groups. Adolescents were mo…

Reviewing Author

Alain Joffe, MD, MPH, FAAP

Disclosures

Nothing to disclose

Alain Joffe, MD, MPH, FAAP

Disclosures

Nothing to disclose