New conclusion belongs to 20-year-long study

Mar 24, 2010 06:38 GMT  ·  By

According to a recently-published scientific paper, it would appear that motherhood, as in becoming a parent, lowers the risk of suicide among women. Correlations were also found between increasing number of children and lower rates of death by suicide, the investigators behind the research write in the latest issue of the respected scientific publication Canadian Medical Association Journal. The idea that this connection exists is more than 111 years old, LiveScience reports.

It was first postulated by Emile Durkheim, a renowned sociologist, back in 1897. The scientist said at the time that parenthood protected people against suicide, and it took more than a century for his hypothesis to be proven accurate. In order for this to be accomplished, team members for the study dedicated 20 years of their life to following up on the actions of 1,292,462 women in Taiwan. They were looking to see whether any correlations between bearing children and risk of suicide developed.

One of the most interesting findings in the study was the fact that suicide rates appeared to drop as women had more children. The researchers say that mothers with two children were about 39 percent less likely to commit suicide than mothers with only one child. In the case of women with three or more kids, the risk dropped by 60 percent. All study participants gave birth to their offspring between December 31, 1978 and December 31, 1987, and they were followed-up at regular intervals until 2007.

“A clear tendency was found toward decreasing suicide rates with increasing number of children after controlling for age at first birth, marital status, years of schooling, and place of delivery. The protective effect of parity on risk of death from suicide was much stronger than previously reported estimates. Given that the women included in this study were young (the large majority of suicide-related deaths occurred before pre-menopausal age) and were among the youngest reported for any country, this finding is particularly noteworthy,” says Kaoshiung Medical University professor Dr. Chun-Yuh Yang.

In the western world, suicide rates have been decreasing both among men and women, but a 3:1 ration exists in these countries. Men kill themselves much more often than females do, but the same does not hold true in Taiwan. Here, suicides are at a 2:1 ratio, due mostly to the fact that more women have the tendency to end their own lives for various reasons.