This research aims to provide the basis of policy to prevent su icide through searching the risk factors of adolescent suicide in Korea. Var iables which have been reported as risk factors of adolescent suicide were investigated and categorized to be compared with reports from outside Korea, and the m ethod of systemic literature review was applied to find out what factors have the major effects. The keyword was limited to ‘adolescent suicide’ and a total of 357 studies (KMBase 63 references, NDSL 67 references, KoreaMed 50 references and RISS 177 references) were searched. After reviewing the titles, 257 references were first selected whose full-texts were then reviewed second to choose 75 referen ces that used suicide attempt and suicidal ideation as outcomes. Significant variables were grouped into the suicidal ideation group and the suicide attempt group in order to find out the general properties of the ultimately selected references, and 69 studies had suicidal ideation as an outcome, and 6 studies had suicide attempt as an outcome. For any one studies that reported several outcomes, each outcome was included as one case. As a result, we were able to classify all the variables into categories which included sociodemographic and educational factors, negative life incidents and family troubles, psychiatric disorders and psychological factors, and description of suicidal behavior and reports of
suicide in various media. The risk factors of the suicide attempt group were high in psychiatric disorders, sexual experience and health behavior in descending order. The risk factors of the suicidal ideation group were other mental illnesses, psychiatric disorders, social factors and sexual experience in descending order, showing a similar pattern to that of the suicide attempt group. The results of literature review in Korea has limitation of operational categorization of various factors, but psychiatric disorders of adolescents need to be treated aggressively in order to prevent suicide attempt and suicidal ideation of adolescents.
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