Israel to fight rising suicide among its youth

(Press TV) -- Israel's Education Ministry plans launching a 'pilot program' to fight the growing rate of suicide among Israeli schoolchildren and teenagers.

The 'national plan for preventing suicide' will be executed in the three communities of Ramle, Rehovot and Kafr Kana and will include special training for school faculty, as well as workshops for parents, Haaretz reported.

The soaring number of suicidal children and youths has forced the Israeli officials to take action and set up plans focusing mainly on school activities.

Yochi Siman Tov, head of the Education Ministry's psychological counseling service (Shefi), put the annual average of suicide cases among Israeli school-aged kids as high as 10 in recent years.

Investigative commissions set up within the ministry have found that around a third of the suicide victims were either new immigrants or children of immigrants.

In 2007, emergency rooms across Israel received 685 children and youths after attempting to commit suicide, three-quarters of whom were female, says an annual report by the National Council for the Child.

The number displays a sharply aggravating situation, as only 469 such cases were reported in 1999, when most suicide attempts were made by teenagers aged 15 to 17, while 198 attempts were by children between the ages of 10 and 14 and even seven attempts were reported by children under nine.

Furthermore, experts at the Israeli Education Ministry warn that at least ten suicide attempts go unreported every year.

The ministry's pilot program includes the introduction of a series of distress signs, such as absence from school, exaggerated responses to failure, drug and alcohol use, gambling, repeated statements about absurdity of life, and physical or sexual exploitation to help school staff and students identify potentially suicidal teenagers and youths.

After road accidents, suicide is blamed as the cause for the most number of deaths among Israeli males aged 15 to 24. It is also the third leading cause of death for females of identical range of age.