Document Type
Article
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Food insecurity (FI) rates in the United States are particularly high among households with children. This research set aims to analyze if high school students experiencing FI had higher risk for mental health and suicidal behaviors.
METHODS: Using combined data from 11 states that conducted the 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a total of 26,962 and24,051 high school students were used to estimate race/ethnicity and sex-stratified prevalence ratios (PRs) from Poissonregression models. A single-question was used to measure the exposure of FI and outcomes of mental health and suicidalbehaviors.
RESULTS: Overall, 10.8% of students reported FI. Students experiencing FI had increased risk for all mental health and suicide behavior outcomes, regardless of their race/ethnicity or sex. PRs ranged from 1.9 (95% confidence interval [CI]:1.8, 2.0) to 3.1 (CI:2.7, 3.6). Among males, PRs for the association between FI and all outcomes were highest among non-Hispanic black students(PRs ranged from 2.4 [CI: 1.7, 3.2] to 5.5 [CI: 2.3, 13.3]). Among females, PRs were highest among non-Hispanic white students(PRs ranged from 1.9 [CI:1.7, 2.1] to 3.6 [CI:2.9, 4.5]).
CONCLUSIONS:FI is consistently associated with mental health and suicidal behaviors among different subgroups of students.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Journal of School Health, Volume 92, Issue 9, 2022, pages 898-906.
Rights
© 2022 The Authors. Journal of School Health published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American School Health Association.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
APA Citation
Brown, A. D., Seligman, H., Sliwa, S., Barnidge, E., Krupsky, K. L., Demissie, Z., & Liese, A. D. (2022). Food insecurity and suicidal behaviors among us high school students*. Journal of School Health, 92(9), 898–906. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.13199