Little is known about the emotional and behavioral sequalae in children who have experienced parental suicide. The current study examined the reactions of children to parental death by suicide by completing a secondary analysis of data from the Grief Research Study, a longitudinal study of bereavement in children. Twenty-six suicide-bereaved (SB) children and adolescents, ages 5-17, were compared with 332 children bereaved from parental death not caused by suicide (NSB). Children and their surviving parents were assessed 1, 6, 13, and 25 months after the death. The children's emotional reactions to the death, family environment, psychiatric symptomatology, and family history of psychopathology were determined.
In general, fewer differences were found between groups than hypothesized. Differences in phenomenology were minimal suggesting that the bereavement experience, per se, is relatively unaffected by type of death, including death by suicide. This may be due in part to the decreased stigmatization of mental illness and suicidal behaviors that has occurred in the past decades. However, some differences were noted in rates of psychopathology between SB and NSB children in the first two years post-parental death. These differences were most notable for disruptive behavior disorders and generalized anxiety disorder. Interestingly, indices of depression and suicidality differed minimally between the two groups.
It should be noted that these cohorts have not yet passed through the age of risk; thus, the lack of robust findings in the area of psychopatholology might not be due to a genuine lack of differences between these groups. As SB children generally come from families with a history of mental illness and high rates of family disruption, SB children need to be followed longitudinally as they pass through the age of risk to determine the specific impact parental suicide has on a young person's development and the emergence of psychopathology.