Parental firearm injury linked to surge in children's psychiatric diagnoses- Harvard Gazette

"Each year, 20,000 children and adolescents across the U.S. lose a parent to gun violence, while an estimated two to three times more have a parent who has been injured due to a firearm. Investigators from Harvard and Mass General Brigham analyzed records from a large health insurance database and found that in the year following a parent's injury, children had increases in psychiatric diagnoses and mental health visits, especially if the parent had suffered a severe injury."

"“Firearm injury is the most common cause of death in children and adolescents, but as horrific as this fact is, it represents only one way in which gun violence impacts young people,” said lead author George Karandinos, a research investigator in the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “As a physician and anthropologist who has worked in areas with concentrated gun violence, I have seen directly how individuals and communities are affected at many levels. By zooming out and using population data, our study draws attention to the way that firearm injuries reverberate through whole families, harming even those who were not injured directly.”"

""Our study draws attention to the way that firearm injuries reverberate through whole families, harming even those who were not injured directly.""

Each year, 20,000 children and adolescents in the U.S. lose a parent to gun violence, and an estimated two to three times more have a parent injured by a firearm. Records from a large health insurance database were analyzed and children whose parent experienced a firearm injury were matched to up to five control children by sex, geographic region, insurance coverage, age, and baseline health risks. In the year after a parent's firearm injury, psychiatric diagnoses and mental-health visits among exposed children increased, with larger effects when the parental injury was severe. Firearm injuries were noted to reverberate through whole families, harming uninjured members.

Read at Harvard Gazette