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A 12-year-old girl attempted suicide not long after school resumed late last month. Some recent media reports say she had been revealing such dark thoughts in her blog for quite sometime, including poor relations with her family and frequent feeling of loneliness.
Local counseling agency Suicide Prevention Services (SPS) said Wednesday it had found almost 1,000 blogs by young people who expressed difficulty dealing with life back to school after the summer vacation and one-third of them even mentioned taking their own lives.
SPS said it also received more than 10 email messages in the past month from local youths who claimed they were unhappy and wanted to commit suicide. The agency described the situation as very serious and asked parents to communicate with their children as often as possible.
Personal journals on the Internet (Weblog or blog) and entries in online forums have become an important channel for today's young people to let loose their emotion. This reporter searched on the Internet for key words such “unhappy”, “back to school” and “want to die”on Wednesday and immediately found dozens of blogs containing expressions of bad feeling.
One such entry, uploaded in May, repeatedly says “I was dumped again” and “I'm so upset I want to kill myself” with a CGI of a bleeding hand to illustrate the author's despair.
SPS Deputy Director Chin Man-hung said at a press conference Wednesday that the agency's help hotline had received over 200 calls from school children and parents complaining of back-to-school pressure and emotional burdens.
With easy access to the Internet just a few mouse clicks away, more and more people have found a convenient way to express their feelings - publishing their own blogs.
Chin therefore called on parent or friends of troubled students to respond with uplifting words if they see their children's blogs or online forum entries professing suicidal notions or anxiety and, better yet, phone numbers and/or email addresses of volunteer groups specialized in helping suicidal individuals.
They must never use such words as “you are better off dead” and “kill yourself already”, because they can easily push the desperate over the edge, she warned.
■春生 資深翻譯員
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