An expanding body of research suggests that childhood trauma and adverse experiences can lead to a variety of negative health outcomes, including substance abuse, depressive disorders, and attempted suicide among adolescents and adults. Alcoholism, depressed affect, and illicit drug use, which are strongly associated with such experiences, appear to partially mediate this relationship as observed in population studies.

We have tested the association between early trauma and suicide attempts in a sample of suicide attempters from the Eureca International Project and a matched healthy control sample.

We have studied the prevalence of childhood stressful events compared with healthy controls in a multicentre sample of 791 suicide attempters (SA) and 630 healthy controls (C), we have measured childhood parental neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse, using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Chi² tests were performed using SPSS v15.0.

A significant increase in prevalence of childhood trauma was found in the suicide attempters sample for all types of trauma: childhood physical abuse: 25.3% (SA) vs. 11.1% (C) (Chi² test: 120,108 P=0.000); childhood sexual abuse: 18.2% (SA) vs. 2.4% (C) (Chi² test: 88,212 P=0.000); parental neglect 25.3% (SA) vs. 1.1% (C) (Chi² test: 164,910 P=0.000); childhood emotional abuse: 34.9% (SA) vs. 5.6% (C) (Chi² test: 176,546 P=0.000).

Suicide attempters were increasingly overrepresented compared with controls if experiencing more than 1 trauma: represented 77% of the sample who suffered 1 type of childhood trauma vs. more than 90% of the sample with 2 or more types of trauma.

A powerful graded relationship exists between adverse childhood experiences and risk of attempted suicide.