The publication this week of a survey of the level of suicide among teenage schoolchildren by the Association of Secondary School Teachers, Ireland, has sharply highlighted the need for more re sources in this area. According to some reports, it can take up to 12 months before much-needed help is given.

It has also renewed calls for the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, to publish the report of the Nat ional Task Force on Suicide, which was commissioned two years ago. According to a Department of Health spokeswoman, it is at an advanced stage of preparation and will be published soon.

One in eight second-level principals in the ASTI survey reported a student committing suicide in recent years. More than 80 per cent were male. Of the 278 principals who responded to a questionnaire sent to nearly 600 principals last year, 13 per cent said there had been a death of a student through suicide in their school, more than two-thirds of which had taken place in the three years up to 1996.

"The lack of resources for the school psychological service is a major problem," according to Mr Aidan Fahy, chairman of Cork Mental Health Association and also a national school principal.

"There is a crying need for a proper service. As well as the sec ondary school students, there are problems among students in national school. You can see children in fourth and fifth class becoming depressed and needing help. But trying to get counselling for them is exceptionally difficult, and you can be waiting anything up to a year, although it is possible to get assistance quickly if you stress that it is an emergency case."

Dr Michael Kelleher, clinical director of the National Suicide Re search Foundation in Cork, said Irish schools were "very much under-served" in comparison to British schools for counselling services. "There may be two to three times as many psychological hours available for pupils in other coun tries as in Ireland. If a child is under stress there should be a system available to the school. I don't think you should say that it should be set up specifically for suicide.

"Skilled counsellors are needed and the school system itself needs to be broadened. There are many advantages to the Junior Certificate and the Leaving Certificate but they are very narrowly focused," said Dr Kelleher.

Aidan Fahy also believes there should be more training for teachers in this area and ideally one teacher in each school should be trained in counselling, "but they would need to be properly trained and could work with an individual pupil and ascertain what the problem is and see if further help is needed."

When a troubled student does slip through the net and commits suicide, the effects can be widespread. According to some principals in the ASTI survey, the stu dent's class mourned for a long time and some students were "very traumatised" and "hysterical". "When you are speaking about a class of up to 30 students a lot of people are affected by the suicide, including teachers, and obviously family and friends.

"In a large school, a student may be in different classes for different subjects and up to 100 students could be affected," said Dr Kelleher. Such suicides usually relate to adolescents but there had been cases here of children not yet in their teens committing suicide. "The suicide figures are beginning to go up for the 13- to 14-year-olds but it is more common for those in their late teens."

Often, he said, with younger children the reasons for the suicide can be of an apparently trivial nature, perhaps over a minor disciplinary matter, and often they are influenced by what they see in the visual media as a manner of how to deal with it. They kill themselves by hanging or jum ping from a height.

For those in their later teens, the problems can be related to their peers, including girlfriends or boyfriends or family. "There is often no single cause. The causes are multi-factoral."

It was not known why so many young men were committing suicide: "It does not appear to be simply an increase in illnesses such as depression. It is more likely that it is a changing attitude to death by suicide. They are less likely to see suicide as a wrong thing to do, like in the past."

Dr Kelleher said studies have been done examining bereavement as a result of a suicide or a sudden death by a young person. "There is evidence that the level of depression following a suicide is greater than following a sudden, unexpected accidental death. The manner of grieving is different. As such when a child dies as a result of an accident while cycling home from school there was no choice involved.

"The parents may blame the driver or the road system, but to lose a son or daughter to suicide they have to deal with different things. They do not want to denigrate the child but they feel anger."

Dr Kelleher said the ASTI survey was "not scientific" but "there is no doubt that the import of it is correct and there has been a genuine rise in young suicides", particularly among young males, and it could not be explained away by better recording of suicide statistics. At least 60 per cent of the rise in young suicides was genuine. He said the suicide rate among young men was up to 2.5 times the death rate from cancer.

"If there is any threat or action of suicidal behaviour by a young person it should be seriously considered and never written off as a gesture not to be repeated. The parents should try to explore it and bring it out into the open.

"If the parents are in doubt about the child, professional help should be sought, but that is not to say that if the child says `I wish I was dead', they should be rushed off to a counsellor. If parents do notice any change of behaviour, if a child falls off in performance, has a narrowing or changing of interest, or if there is any question that the child is misusing recreational drugs, then it is a good idea to investigate further."

Dr Finbarr O'Leary, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with the Southern Health Board, said that suicide in young children was still rare, but the rates were undoubtedly increasing among the 15 to 25-year olds. There are only 34 full-time child psychiatrists in the State, he said, when at least 100 were needed.

The most important message to parents was to listen to their chil dren's worries and encourage them to share them. "Adults should not be deflected from making appropriate decisions for fear of a future episode of self-harm which a child may use as a threat," said Dr O'Leary.

A new study of suicide just published in the Irish Journal of Psy- chiatry confirmed that males were at a higher risk and those committing suicide were getting younger. Although still likely to have a history of psychiatric illness, particularly depression or alcohol abuse, a growing number of victims, particularly young men, do not have documented mental disorder.

The study, which examined the psychosocial profile of 70 victims of suicide in Dublin during a twoyear period, says that, in some, suicide often appears to be an impulsive act which has significant implications for the success or failure of preventive measures.

"It would seem that sociocultural change with increasing frustration and multiple stresses cer tainly increases the vulnerability of this population. It seems, also, that suicide is now an accepted option for the young when times are bad.

"This is probably due to complex and multiple factors, including increasing violence in society in general and probably, to a lesser extent, relaxation of the religious taboo in relation to suicide," according to the authors, Dr Sheila McGauran, consultant psychiatrist, Dr Michael Fitzgerald, consultant child psychiatrist and Dr Ronan Lyons, consultant in public health medicine.

The National Task Force on Suicide calls for health boards to be given a role in suicide prevention, and the setting up of a central review committee at national level to examine ways of reducing the level of suicide and how other countries have had success in reducing their rates. "But any initiatives must be tied to ongoing research, otherwise limited and valuable resources will be put towards ineffective methods," Dr Kelleher said.