A local minister has spoken of a community going into "freefall hysteria" after a third pupil at Craigavon Senior High School in Co Armagh died by suicide last week.
Lee Walker (15) from Laurelvale, near Portadown, is thought to have hanged himself last Friday. Two other pupils at the school, Wayne Brown and James Topley, also died recently.
PSNI detectives investigating the deaths of two other young men at Gortin Lakes in Co Tyrone earlier this month are following a lead that they arranged their deaths via an internet chatroom.
However, referring to the Craigavon deaths, local minister the Rev Brian Harper said he did not believe there had been a suicide pact among the three school friends. But he added that rumour-mongering was causing problems and adding to tension in the area.
"The community has gone into freefall hysteria over the weekend," he told the BBC.
"Parents have been told that their children are dead. Children are receiving text messages that their best friends are dead. They are going absolutely hysterical, and once text messaging starts, it flies through the whole community. There hasn't been a single bit of truth to any of the rumours."
School principal David Mehaffey said the school was liaising with the local education board to try to address the needs of teenagers.
The Samaritans' director for Ireland Suzanne Costello agreed with Mr Harper's remarks. "The three boys who have died went to the same school but it's not helpful to link together individual incidents and start rumours of a series beginning [ with] suggestions of pacts without evidence."
At Stormont, Minister for Health Michael McGimpsey called on website hosts to do more to prevent vulnerable people from using the internet to plan self-harm. He said he wanted to talk to the companies behind networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace about their strategy for dealing with vulnerable teenagers.
"One of the questions we have to ask, though, is what responsibility are internet operators assuming in this because the internet is being used widely as part of the contagion?" he said.
In west Belfast, the health service has apologised to a local family for its failings in the case of a young man with depression who later hanged himself.
Danny McCartan (18) died in April 2005 after seeking admission to hospital. However, he was turned down in part because his suicide risk was estimated to be low.
The trust responsible for hospital services in the area has apologised, but the McCartan family say they want improvements to services rather than apologies. "An apology doesn't matter at all to us," his father, also called Danny, said.
An investigation into the case found that Mr McCartan's care was affected by a lack of co-ordination in the health service system, said Bernie McNally, director of children's services at Belfast Health and Social Care Trust: "There is no doubt that the services failed Danny. There is no doubt that child and adolescent mental health services at that time were not good."