I was on my way home from school. We went the same way four times a day. One particular day a small crowd had gathered outside a house. Full of curiosity I stopped to have a look. Shortly afterwards a man was carried out on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance.

I caught the whispered words from hushed onlookers: "suicide - gassed himself". I can still vividly see in my mind's eye the man's bald head and the red blanket which covered his body.

That was the first time I encountered suicide. The house has long gone. The school is no longer a school. The street has changed out of all recognition, and though over 40 years have passed, I can still remember the horror of it all.

It was quite a while before I next encountered suicide. This time it was in the 1970s and I was teaching in a small school when one of the parents killed himself. It was a while before I was told it was suicide. By then I had worked it out for myself.

Another parent, who lived on the same road, let drop that the gardai had been called. Sometime later in the same school, the mother of an eight-year-old came to see me one morning before class. "Mary may be a bit difficult this morning. She hasn't her homework done. Her father tried to kill himself yesterday," she said. The poor man had been suffering from depression.

These incidents occurred over a long period of years but they still stand out in my mind. There was such a stigma about suicide in those days. A cloak of secrecy surrounded such deaths. Often one was told that the death had occurred accidentally.

We live in changed times. The secrecy is gone and that is a good thing. But the 1990s have also seen a great increase in the number of suicides. The most remarkable difference is the number of young people who choose to die in this way.

Beautiful young people, from loving homes with caring parents and families, for no apparent reason, kill themselves. In the last few months I have heard of five suicides, three of them young people. I didn't know any of them personally and yet they touched my life through the huge impact their deaths had on their friends, relatives, or classmates, whom I knew. The devastation, the never-ending search for a reason, the effort to make sense of what has happened: Why? Why? Why?

Only the naive or the foolhardy would dare to come up with answers for individual suicides. A broken romance, poor relationships, examination stress, fear of failure, feelings of alienation, inadequacy, rejection, insecurity, loneliness, lack of faith, lack of self-esteem, peer pressure, inability to cope . . .on and on, around in circles goes the search.

Recently there was some controversy over the numbers involved. According to a report by Joe Humphries in this newspaper on May 11th, official statistics showed that there were 433 suicides in Ireland in 1997 and an estimated 480 to 500 last year. A worrying increase.

More worrying, however, was the paper's reported claim by Dr Patrick McKeown, chairman of Aware - the organisation set up 14 years ago to help those with depression and increase public awareness of the problem - that "to the best of my knowledge, Ireland was unique in being the only state in which suicide was the most common cause of death for young men."

In other countries, either road traffic accidents or cancer claimed more young men's lives. Seven times more young men kill themselves in Ireland than young women. Most worrying of all was the information that only 18 to 20 per cent of the young men who committed suicide had contacted a health agency or doctor for help in the previous year, compared to 80 per cent of the young women. Dr McKeown commented that "men feel a need to appear strong and seeking help is seen as a weakness."

The need to break down such stereotypes has never been greater, nor has the necessity to provide more pastoral care services in second-level and third-level institutions: more counsellors, chaplains, and psychologists to counteract the often overpowering vastness and impersonal ambience of some of these places.

There is also an urgent need to raise public awareness, to help parents, youth leaders, teachers, lecturers, clergy, all who work and meet with young people, to be more sensitive to their needs. The irony is that teenagers and young adults have never appeared more self-confident or more sophisticated than they do today, with their mobile phones, cars, foreign travel, and their abundance of worldly knowledge.

They know everything and have an answer for everything. Yet behind the "cool" exterior and yuppie image often lurks a vulnerable soul, prone to self-doubt and despair.

They need to know that organisations such as Aware and the Samaritans exist to help them. The efforts of Fintan Dunne of Men's Aid, with its compelling radio ad - "let's listen to how men cope with trauma" or the stark "I used to dream of committing suicide but I couldn't do it to my family" - may reach others.

There is also an urgent need to provide services for classmates and friends when a suicide occurs, to help them cope with the trauma. More research is needed, too, into how to react to such deaths. Will drawing attention to them lead to copy-cat occurrences?

Another group of people who need help is those who by the nature of their work are first on the scene after a suicide. Those who find the body - the gardai, clergy, train drivers, gas company officials. What provision is there for them? Who counsels them?

One of the most vulnerable groups must be parish clergy, who not only have to conduct the funeral service but also have the ongoing task of providing pastoral care for a devastated family and community. Now, at least funerals are being held. There was a time when they weren't.

In this respect the adoption of "Hope in the Face of Suicide" as the theme of the annual World Day of the Sick in February this year has to be commended. The special liturgy used at an ecumenical service with Archbishop Desmond Connell and Archbishop Walton Empey participating at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, brought solace to the hundreds present.

Many whose families have been affected by suicide found the shared experience a great comfort. Could such services not be organised in other places throughout the State?

Valerie Jones was a representative of the Dublin archdiocese at the recent Church of Ireland Synod where she spoke on the subject of suicide.