This short-term longitudinal study used survival analyses to examine predictors of time-to-suicide attempt for adolescents who were acutely suicidal and psychiatrically hospitalized at the beginning of the study. Our primary results point to the substantial impact of parental mental health problems on these adolescents’ course and outcome, or developmental trajectories, following psychiatric hospitalization. They indicate that adolescents were about twice as likely to make a suicide attempt over the course of the year if they had at least one biological parent with a history of a mental health problem. In fact, the 1-year cumulative incidence of suicide attempts was approximately 23% for adolescents with at least one biological parent with a history of mental health problems and 10% for other adolescents. Perhaps the most striking finding is that adjustment for multiple attempt history, severity of suicidal ideation, and functional impairment—three clinically significant variables—had little impact on the estimated effect of parental history of mental health problems.
