Antidepressants and risk of suicide or self-harm in Canadian youth: a national population-based study

Project number: 
08-017
Approval date: 
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Principal Investigator: 
Lynd,Larry
Institution: 
University of British Columbia (UBC)
Funding Agency: 
Canadian Institutes of Health Research(CIHR)
Datasets requested: 
Medical Services Plan (BC Ministry of Health)
Consolidation - demographic (Ministry of Health)
Hospital Separations (BC Ministry of Health)
Consolidation registry (Ministry of Health)
Mental Health (BC Ministry of Health)
consolidation - census geocodes
Deaths (BC Vital Statistics Agency)
Research objective: 

Antidepressant-related self-harm in youth has generated great concern among regulatory authorities. To assess the association between antidepressant use and self-harm we propose to: 1) Estimate the incidence rate of non-fatal self-harm among youth aged 10-19 in BC who are taking antidepressants; 2) compare classes of antidepressants with respect to the rate of non-fatal self-harm; 3) ascertain the incidence rate of non-fatal self-harm as a function of treatment duration and following discontinuation, i.e., the hazard function; 4) determine the hazard ration (i.e., adherence, psychiatric diagnosis, comedication, socio-economic status, previous self-harm episodes) in order to identify high-risk patients; and 6) determine whether there is an association between anti-depressant use and suicide using BC Coroner's Service reports to identify suicides.

Publications: 

Conference abstract/presentation

  • 1. International Society for of Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) 2014 - Abstracts of the 30th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management (ICPE), October 24–27, 2014, Taipei, Taiwan

    Conference abstract published in:
    Larry L Lynd, Thierry Ducruet, Kathy Li, Marie Tournier, Brian Greenfield, Yola Moride. Antidepressants and risk of suicide or self-harm in Canadian
    youth: A study involving common data models in Quebec and British Columbia.
    In: Pharmacoepidemiol Drug g Saf. 2014;23(S1). doi: 10.1002/pds.3701.

    2. French Congress of Psychiatry (Congrès Français de Psychiatrie 2015), Lille, France, November 25-28, 2015

    Conference abstract published in:
    Y. Moride , L. Lynd, H. Ducruet , H. Li , M. Tournier , B. Greenield.
    Antidepressants and risk of suicide or self-harm in Canadian youth: A study involving common data models in Quebec and British Columbia. In: Congrès franc¸ ais de psychiatrie / European Psychiatry 30S (2015) S9–S65: SC1.
    doi: 10.1016/j.europsy.2015.09.038.


Page last revised: September 2, 2019