Summarize the psychological factors associated with adolescent suicide.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Several psychological factors play a role in the sharp increase in suicides in adolescence. One factor is teenagers' improved ability to plan ahead. Although some act impulsively, many young people take purposeful steps toward killing themselves. Other cognitive changes also contribute: Belief in the personal fable leads many depressed young people to conclude that no one could possibly understand their intense pain. As a result, despair, hopelessness, and isolation deepen.
Suicide tends to occur in two types of young people. The first group includes adolescents who are highly intelligent but solitary, withdrawn, and unable to meet their own standards or those of important people in their lives. Members of a second, larger group show antisocial tendencies. Besides being hostile and destructive toward others, they turn their anger and disappointment inward.
Suicidal adolescents often have a family history of emotional and antisocial disorders and suicide. In addition, they are likely to have experienced multiple stressful life events, including economic disadvantage, parental divorce, frequent parent-child conflict, maltreatment, and drug abuse. Triggering events include parental blaming of the teenager for family problems, the breakup of an important peer relationship, or the humiliation of having been caught engaging in antisocial acts.