Kids of mentally ill parents at higher murder risk
Children of severely mentally ill parents are nearly nine times more likely to be victims of homicide than children of healthy parents, suggests a new study.
However, as the Danish researchers note, the tragic event is still extremely rare, and the overwhelming majority of psychiatric patients don’t murder their children.
About one out of every 17 adults in the U.S. has a serious psychiatric illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And parents with psychiatric problems affect children’s health in many ways, lead researcher Thomas M. Laursen of the National Centre for Register-Based Research at Aarhus University, Denmark, told Reuters Health in an email.
In their study of a particularly sad aspect of this problem, Laursen and colleagues set out to learn whether having a parent who’d been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons made kids more vulnerable to being murdered.
They studied police records and data from the Danish Civil Registration System for people born in Denmark between 1973 and 2006. They identified all cases of child homicide and also determined whether or not one of the parents was the perpetrator of the crime.
The actual risk of a child being a murder victim before his or her 18th birthday was extremely low: one in every 10,000 children of healthy parents and one in every 2,000 kids with a parent who’d been a patient in a psychiatric hospital at some point.
The team found that children were at a greater risk if one of their parents had schizophrenia or a mood disorder. This was particularly true if the condition affected their mother.
Nevertheless, “the overwhelming majority of children whose parents have a psychiatric history do not become homicide victims,” said Laursen.
Among the population of about 5 million people, the team found 187 child homicides. Sixty of the children had a parent who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital before birth.
In nine out of every 10 cases, the death was at the hands of the mother or father, but this was true regardless of whether or not a parent had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the researchers report in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
“I think we have to conclude that (these events) are so rare that it is impossible to develop any strategies towards minimizing the risk,” Laursen said. “We could, however, take the high relative risk as a tip-of-the-iceberg indicator of less severe, but still important problems for children of parents with psychiatric problems.”
SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, online October 5, 2010.