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Teenagers are a difficult lot to understand and handle but making them feel unwanted or invalidating their choices can push them towards suicidal tendencies.
Independent of other known risk factors, measuring the sense of family or peer invalidation – or lack of acceptance – that teenagers harbour can help predict whether they will try to harm themselves or attempt suicide, says a study.
In some cases, such a sense of lack of invalidation could come from being bullied, said the study.
‘In the case of family, a teenager who is gay may feel a strong degree of invalidation if he or she perceives that parents would either disapprove or be disappointed upon finding out,’ said Shirley Yen, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at the Brown University in the US.
The team observed 99 teenagers, who had been hospitalised out of fear of committing suicide, for six months of follow-up. Along the way they assessed the teens’ sense of family and peer invalidation and found that a high perception of family invalidation led to future suicide events among boys and peer invalidation predicted future self harm, among teenagers.
A moderate to high perception of family invalidation proved a statistically significant predictor of a later suicide event among boys, the findings showed.
‘What this points to is the importance of assessing the teen’s individual feelings of invalidation,’ Yen noted.
The study appeared in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.
So what pushes them to the brink?
People usually commit suicide when they feel they have no way out. Their sense of grief is so strong that they do not realise that there are other options. The pain they experience could be rightfully so, due to a tragic event or some form of a mental ailment. The way they feel often makes them think that they are isolated and, that they cannot share their feelings with anybody, further worsening their situation. In most cases a suicidal person would not have attempted suicide had they not been in great distress and able to choose differently.
With inputs from IANS
Photo source: Getty
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Disapproving teenagers’ choices can increase suicide risk
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