Suicidal children

Abstract

This study gathers the literature on suicidal children and creates guidelines designed to assist professionals with assessing the suicidality of a child. Analysis of the literature reveals that there are varying ages of children used in the research, a lack of standardization for the definition of suicide, and resistance towards a collective research approach to understanding suicidal behaviour. The literature also identifies the important risk factors, which are incorporated into guidelines for determing this sucidality of a child: family discord and violence, depression, significant loss, poor and/or dysfunctional parent/child communication and bonding, aggressive behaviour, stress, physical abuse, parental separation/divorce, hopelessness, academic difficulties, prior suicide attempts, and viewing death as a temporary state of being.