Russia’s Krasnodar region on Tuesday reported that a 13-years-old boy hung himself on Saturday, making it the eighth in a series of teen suicides throughout Russia in the past week.
Also, the investigating authorities of the Tomsk region reported that a boy committed suicide by hanging himself.
Investigators in Bashkortostan on Tuesday started investigating the details of the suicide of a teenager who hanged himself on February 9 in the village of Iglina, apprently due to relationship problems.
A week ago, two girls, eighth grade students, committed double suicide after jumping from the roof of a house in the town of Lobnya outside of Moscow. Reportedly the girls had skipped classes for two weeks and were afraid about what would happen when their parents found out. The next day a 15-year-old teenage boy jumped out of the window of an apartment house in Moscow after, according to investigators, a family quarrel.
On Thursday, a 12-year-old resident of the Krasnoyarsk region was found hanged in his apartment and a seventh grader in the Tambov region was found after hanging himself.
On Saturday, a ninth-grade girl jumped from a window in the Perovo region of Moscow.
In connection with these events, the Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov wrote on his Twitter page: “it is not a ‘suicide epidemic’ but a public tragedy.” According to him, “if we don’t solve the root of the problem and don’t create a government program we’ll lose a generation.”
About 4,000 suicide attempts are committed by teenagers in Russia annually and in about 1,500 cases the teenager dies, the ombudsman said.
Russia ranks third in the world in terms of the number of suicides committed by adolescents, with average suicide rate among the adolescent population being more than three times higher than the world’s average, according to UNICEF data published in November 2011.
While the level of adolescent depression in Western countries does not exceed 5 percent, the same level in Russia is hovering at about 20 percent. Statistics show that 45 percent of girls and 27 percent of young men in Russia have had thoughts of suicide, UNICEF added.
