4 Troubled Teens Blog

Over the past few years, West Virginia has experienced one of the highest increases in the rate of drug overdose deaths of any state. Between 1999 and 2004, West Virginia's rate of unintentional poisoning more than quintupled, increasing by an astounding 550 percent. A new study of these deaths has found that most of these fatalities were the result of non-medical/recreational use of prescription drugs. The most commonly identified type of drug in these cases was prescription pain killers.

Beginning in 1997, experts in pain management began encouraging wider use of opioid pain medications for the management of chronic pain problems. The experts also recommended that patients who were prescribed opioid pain medications be carefully evaluated and counseled. In the past 10 years, however, per capita sales of pain relievers in the United States have increased drastically. Notably, emergency room visits and deaths because of pain killer overdoses have also significantly increased.

The West Virginia study was conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. (Source: sciencedaily.com)

Labels: prescription_drug_abuse, overdose, pain-killers

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 0 Comments

If a parent commits suicide when a child is under 18 years old, the child has a three-fold risk for taking his or her own life too, according to a new study from Sweden. There was no increased risk if a parent committed suicide when the child was a young adult, age 18 to 25 years old.

"The disruption associated with parental suicide, we think, is greater when someone loses a parent during childhood and adolescence," said author Holly Wilcox of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

• Researchers reviewed the records of more than 500,000 Swedish children, teens and young adults whose parents had died because of suicide, accidents or illness. 
• They then compared these children to four million children the same ages with living parents.
• Not only did they find an increased risk for suicide among children whose parents had committed suicide, the researchers also found that a child's risk of becoming a violent criminal increased after the death of a parent.

A previous study found that suicide attempts run in families, and sometimes it is the children who attempt suicide before their parents do.  There may be a hereditary factor for depression , that accounts for the results of these studies.

The newest study appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Labels: parental_involvement, suicide, pain-killers

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 0 Comments