Exploring Individual and Family-Level Risk and Protective Factors for Suicidality Among Black Youth

Background and Purpose: Recent research highlights a growing racial disparity in suicide rates among Black and White children in the United States. Thus, scholars have noted the need to further explore the risk and protective factors (RPFs) related to suicidal behavior among Black children/youth. Understanding individual and family-level RPFs will be key to future investigations. Prior research has found a significant association between adolescent’s levels of perceived connectedness with parents and lower risk for suicidal thoughts and behavior. An investigation of parental social support as a moderator for suicidal thoughts among African American adolescents found that increased family support served as a protective factor against suicidality. Although social support from close family members is a well-established protective factor, an understudied factor in the current literature is the association between parental psychological distress and adolescent suicidality. While several studies have found a strong positive relationship between parent psychological distress and adolescent mental health, few have explored this relationship in the context of risk for adolescent suicidal ideation.

Methods: The current study uses secondary data from the Black Families Project (BFP), a dyadic survey of 604 Black adolescents and their primary caregiver from across the United States. Data from the BFP was designed and collected with the goal of understanding the psychological, physical, economic, and political health of Black caregivers and their adolescent children with a focus on family socialization and communication within our current sociopolitical climate. A strength of this data set is its focus on caregiver-adolescent dyads beyond the mother-child dyad and low-SES families most typically seen in research on Black families. Caregiver-adolescent dyads were recruited using Qualtrics Panels. Potential participants were sent an email invitation to participate in the study. Participants qualified if they identified as Black/African American, and were a caregiver to an adolescent (ages 13 - 17). The caregivers and adolescents answered survey questions regarding community, politics, criminal justice, discrimination, identity, parenting, physical health, and mental health. The current study uses hierarchical logistic regression to explore the impacts of individual level factors (youth depression, closeness to mother, closeness to father) and family-level factors (parental depression, parental suicidal ideation) on youth report of suicidal ideation within the past 12 months.

Results: Preliminary results indicate that youth’s level of depression, parental endorsement of suicidal thoughts and youth’s perceived closeness to father were each a significant predictor of youth suicidality.

Conclusion/Implications: Youth in the current study who reported higher levels of perceived closeness to their father figures, had lower odds of reporting suicidal ideations within the last twelve months. Given the increased national attention on the impacts of fathers in families, this finding makes a unique contribution to our understanding of protective factors against suicidal ideation for Black youth. Conversely, youth with a parent who reported suicidal ideations within the last twelve months had increased odds of suicidal ideation. An exploration of this and other factors associated with structural factors like race and SES will be key in understanding the bidirectional effects of parent-child relationships in the context of suicide.