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Employee layoffs may boost suicide attempts in teens, according to a new study.

New research reveals that mass layoffs may boost suicidal behavior among teens, particularly among female and black teens.

Lead researcher Anna Gassman-Pines and her team from Duke University discovered that suicide-related behaviors increased by 2 to 3 percentage points among girls and black adolescents the year after 1 percent of a state's working population lost jobs.

Researchers noted that suicide plans rose among girls. However, thoughts of suicide, suicide plans and suicide attempts increased among black teens.

"Job loss can be an unanticipated shock to a community," Gassman-Pines, who teaches public policy at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy and is a faculty fellow of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy, said in a news release. "We know that suicide increases among adults when communities are hit with widespread layoffs. Now we have evidence that teenagers are similarly affected."

The latest study involved 403,457 adolescents who filled out surveys from 1997 to 2009. Researchers said the findings held true even after accounting for variables like poverty rate and overall unemployment.

"Job loss was not simply a proxy for other aspects of the state's economic climate, but instead represented a meaningful economic shock, which led to changes in girls' and black adolescents' suicide-related behaviors," Gassman-Pines and her team wrote in the study.

The findings were published Aug. 14 in the American Journal of Public Health.