V. Rotsika

Adolescents’ self-reported suicide attempts, self-harm thoughts and their correlates across 17 European countries

BACKGROUND   Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents in Europe. Self-harm thoughts and behaviours are documented precursors of completed suicide. It is therefore of great importance to investigate the prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts and their correlates, with the aim of preventing this major life-threatening public health problem. This study provides cross-national European data on self-reported suicidal thoughts and attempts among adolescents. METHODS   Data were obtained from 45,806 high school students aged 15-16 years from 17 countries that participated in the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) 2007 school survey. The standardised methods of the ESPAD survey ensure comparability across countries. Students completed an anonymous questionnaire in their classrooms. The prevalences of suicidal thoughts and attempts are reported as well as their sociodemographic and psychosocial correlates identified in logistic regression. RESULTS   The median prevalence of any lifetime self-reported suicide attempt was 10.5% across the participating countries (range 4.1%-23.5%). The median of frequent self-harm thoughts (at least five times) was 7.4% (range 2.1%-15.3%). Suicidal behaviour and thoughts had significant associations with gender, substance use, family integrity and socioeconomic status. Countries with higher prevalence of substance use tended to have a weaker association between substance use and self-reported suicide attempts. CONCLUSION   Although self-reported self-harm thoughts and suicide attempts vary in prevalence within Europe, there are common correlates across countries. These have an important impact on understanding the phenomenon of suicide among young people and in guiding prevention.

The WISC-III Profile in Greek Children with Learning Disabilities: Different Language, Similar Difficulties

This study investigates the WISC-III profile in Greek children with learning disabilities (LD). The sample consisted of 180 children diagnosed with learning disability (136 boys, 44 girls) aged 6.11 to 14.4 years. The Mean Full-scale IQ is 96.08, Mean Verbal IQ is 96.38, and Mean Performance IQ is 96.61. On individual subtests, the lowest mean scores are for Digit Span and Arithmetic whereas the highest are for Similarities and Picture Completion. Forty eight percent of our sample has a higher Verbal Intelligence, while 46.7% has a higher Performance Intelligence. These results indicate that the WISC-III profile in Greek-speaking children with LD is similar to that shown by an English-speaking sample with respect to the most difficult subtests. This finding implies that despite linguistic differences between the Greek and English languages, deficits in short term memory and working memory are responsible for the emergence of learning disabilities in both languages.

Early detection of learning difficulties

All 788 children attending kindergarten in 2 boroughs of Athens were screened for concentration, hyperkinesis, behaviour disorder and language delay with the help of two questionnaires. The ones with high scores (high risk for presenting learning difficulties (n = 40) were compared with the low (n = 43) and medium (n = 14) risk ones on psychological tests. The above children were reexamined one year later with reading, writing and arithmetic tests. 25% of the high risk groups failed to learn, to read and write while all the low risk group had achieved these abilities. The best predictors were the tests Frostig I and IV and TMS.