Children exposed to their parents’ patterns of suicidal behavior and methods are at a higher risk for repeating the same behaviors, according to a Danish study published in Lancet Psychiatry.
“Suicidal behavior has been shown to cluster in families with higher risk in the offspring of parents who died by suicide than in unexposed individuals,” Anne Ranning, PhD, of the Copenhagen Research Center for Mental Health, Gentofte Hospital, and colleagues wrote.
Ranning and colleagues sought to discover if the presence and nature of suicidal behaviors in parents were associated with