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| Lorraine |
A new study has found that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to
attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after
adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior such as psychiatric
disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic
disengagement. Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide. About 75
percent of the adopted teens (more than 1,200 all living in Minnesota) in the
study were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from
South Korea.
All of the adopted kids, who were between 11 and 21 years old during
the study period, had been taken in by their families before age two, and
had a biologically unrelated teenage sibling in the same home. Although this study could not determine why the adopted teens were more
likely to attempt suicide,
