In June 2021, in the Lipetsk region, three schoolchildren committed suicide near the Dolgorukovo railway station.
They all knew each other.
On June 11, a 14-year-old resident of the village of Kharlamovka, Maria, committed suicide.
Three days later, the body of her 16-year-old boyfriend Sasha was found at the same station.
The investigation established that the teenager knew about the girl's plans to commit suicide and told Masha's mother about it.
The woman immediately called her daughter and told her to go home.
In her last video message, which Masha sent to her mother, the girl said that she “had to die earlier because of Sanka,” because he told everything.
This video was published online immediately after Masha's death.
As RT was told in the Terbunsky interdistrict investigation department of the TFR in the Lipetsk region, during interrogation, Sasha behaved quite calmly, but at the same time considered himself guilty for the death of Masha.
This is also noted by the schoolchild's neighbors: he said that he was very worried.
On the night of June 25, 15-year-old Larisa committed suicide.
They were friends with Masha and sat at the same desk.
The media reported that all three were victims of "death groups" on social media in which children are encouraged to commit suicide.
However, representatives of the investigative committee said that of the three victims, only Maria was in such a group, and Sasha and Larisa had nothing to do with them.
According to experts, they could have been saved if the adolescents were first and foremost given the attention of social workers, since they were the deceased's closest friends.
There are not enough brigades
As experts note, it is necessary to react to such tragedies very quickly precisely because after one teenager, his classmates and friends can commit suicide attempts.
At the same time, there is still no single plan for responding to teenage suicides in Russia.
Each region today must independently build a system for the prevention of suicide among children.
In practice, however, most Russian regions lack the resources to quickly provide support to adolescents who may be affected by the suicide of a friend or classmate.
One of the main problems is the lack of specialists.
This was told to RT by Gennady Bannikov, a senior researcher at the Suicidology Department of the Serbian Federal Medical Research Center for Psychiatry and Narcology.
“The lack of psychologists and psychotherapists is a serious problem for all subjects.
In addition, the problem of long distances is added in the Siberian regions.
If a tragedy occurs in remote cities or villages, then it can be difficult for specialists to get to the place.
For example, this concerns Buryatia, where there is a very high rate of teenage suicides, ”says Bannikov.
According to the specialist, psychologists should ideally work on the spot with classmates, relatives and teachers of the deceased for at least three days and accompany them during the funeral.
“From my experience of working in such situations, I can say that adolescents do not fully understand what death is.
This is not surprising, because among people there is generally no common understanding of what awaits us after death.
Some schoolchildren may perceive death as an opportunity to meet again with someone dear to them.
The task of a psychologist is to recognize this motive of reunion in a teenager, ”the source explains.
"Parents are not ready to know the truth"
There are no uniform rules for informing adolescents about suicidal behavior.
This work may be done by class teachers or school psychologists, but they are not required to do so.
The question of whether to talk to children about depression, death and self-harm is decided not even at the regional, district or school level, but at the level of teachers, says Elena, who has been working as a teacher and class teacher in secondary schools in Mordovia for ten years.
"If the discussion of this issue is not included in the school educational plan, then the class teacher can, at his discretion, talk about this with the children at classroom hours," explains the interlocutor of RT.
In 2017, she had to talk to children about suicide after one of the school's students jumped off the roof of a fitness center.
According to Elena, the 14-year-old girl survived, but broke her spine - four years later, she still cannot walk on her own.
After the incident, the media wrote that the schoolgirl was provoked into "death groups".
Before jumping, she photographed the view from the roof of the building and sent a message in which she accused her family of misunderstanding.
Elena says that the "death groups" had nothing to do with it, during the investigation it turned out that the girl was worried about difficult relationships in the family.
“After the incident, the school administration and teachers had to fill out numerous papers and answer the investigators' questions about why none of them paid attention to the girl’s behavior,” Elena recalls.
According to her, a lot depends on the personal qualities of the teacher himself or the class teacher: whether he will notice changes in the child's behavior.
“For example, I had a case when a student began to skip school.
I decided to talk to her personally - we didn't have a psychologist on our staff, - says Elena.
"We solved the problem, but this conversation could potentially get me in trouble because the teacher cannot have private conversations with children without parental permission."
It is to the work of teachers and school psychologists that law enforcement officers and the public pay attention first of all when a teenager makes a suicide attempt.
So, at the beginning of this year, the prosecutor's office of Naberezhnye Chelny decided to punish the psychologist of gymnasium No. 29 after a 14-year-old schoolgirl tried to commit suicide.
The prosecutor's office demanded that the school director bring the psychologist to disciplinary responsibility.
The supervisory authority considered that the teacher-psychologist of the gymnasium did not organize psychological diagnostics of students, did not find any deviations in the student's behavior in time and did not provide her with assistance.
“Calendar-thematic planning of educational work in an educational organization is formal in nature and does not contain psychological and pedagogical activities.
Some of the schoolchildren, due to the refusal of their parents, are generally deprived of psychological and pedagogical support and the opportunity to participate in psychological events, ”the press service of the prosecutor’s office said.
The department also added that the school leadership did not speak with these parents to explain to them the importance of psychological counseling.
Psychologist Anna Reznikova, who also works with adolescents who are prone to suicide or who have attempted to die, explains that it is necessary to work not only with the child himself, but also with his immediate environment.
Although adolescents come to psychotherapy voluntarily and with parental consent, often adults are not ready or afraid to learn the truth about their children's problems.
“If you tell parents that their child has a little more problems than they initially thought, they often don’t want to hear it, some even take their children from psychotherapy.
If we are talking about a tendency to self-harm or suicide, then the psychologist needs to work with both the child and his parents.
Adults also need to be prepared to inform them about the problems of children and tell them how to cope with them, ”explained Reznikova.
Finding the meaning of life on the phone
Svetlana Naumova, a resident of Naberezhnye Chelny, told RT that she turned to specialists in the struggle for her son's life, but this did not work.
In 2016, Svetlana first noticed cuts on the arms of her son Nikolai.
In response to questions, a 14-year-old schoolboy illegibly replied that he fell and accidentally scratched himself.
The woman noticed that her son had changed dramatically within two or three months: from a sociable child, he turned into a closed and secretive one.
According to her, she always had a very trusting relationship with her youngest son.
“Until that fall, when he entered the ninth grade, we were like two friends - we could talk about everything.
And then he began to hide from me.
As soon as I went to his computer, he immediately closed everything, did not let me see who he was texting with.
Then I set a password so that I could not go in and check his social network.
This was not the case before, ”says Svetlana.
At school, Kolya always studied at "four" and "five", especially mathematics was given to him.
He also studied chess - by the age of 14 he had the first adult category.
From the beginning of the school year, the teenager suddenly began to skip school in secret from his parents.
And in November something happened that neither his parents nor his older brother could explain to themselves - Kolya tried to kill himself.
“After that I took my son to a psychologist.
I could not understand in any way why he decided to do this to himself.
The psychologist advised me to go to a psychiatric hospital.
We lay there for three weeks, and then the doctors discharged our son, saying that he had an improvement - they sent him to a day hospital, ”Svetlana said.
Just a few days after being discharged from the hospital with an improvement, on January 17, 2017, Kolya was found under the windows of a multi-storey building where his family lives - the boy died instantly.
“A criminal case was opened on bringing to suicide, but two months later it was closed.
Last year, the case was resumed, because we wrote a petition to the prosecutor's office and the ICR, ”says Svetlana.
The woman is sure that the curators of the "death groups" in which he was a member pushed her son to commit suicide.
According to her, the boy could not kill himself without provoking other people, because both in the family and at school he had good relations with others.
Now in all Russian regions there are children's helplines where teenagers can turn for psychological help.
In Moscow, specialists receive about 25 thousand requests from children per year.
About 6% (1.5 thousand requests) relate to suicidal issues: suicidal thoughts and plans, self-harm, the state after a suicidal attempt.
That is, only in Moscow every day four teenagers who are concerned about the topic of suicide turn to psychologists by phone.
A telephone consultation lasts from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours.
During this time, the psychologist must listen to the child and help him find resources in life to survive a difficult situation, Anna Ermolaeva, head of the Children's Helpline Remote Counseling Sector, told RT.
“A child with suicidal thoughts is always in a state of tunnel consciousness: he sees a problem, and it seems to him that the only way out of it is suicide.
The task of the consultant is to expand his understanding of this problem, to show that there are other ways of solving it.
It is also important to help him find a meaning in life that he can cling to.
It can be anything you want: not only parents and friends, but also a flower on the window, which there will be no one to water but a child, ”the expert noted.