TRAGEDY

It has already been two weeks since an anti-influenza quarantine was announced in the schools. Thus many teenagers accompanied the girls on their last journey - those who knew them and those who did not. Netishyn cannot find the answer to the terrible questions: why, and what for?.. Mykhailo Mychuda, chief investigator of Netishyn Prosecutor's Office is investigating this difficult case. He has already talked to the grief-stricken parents of the deceased, to their teachers, to the teenagers who the girls said goodbye to and then went to the fatal roof of the building on Nezalezhnosty (Independence) Prospect. "Many versions are being worked out. We do not rule out the possibility that somebody had such a terrible influence on Olena and Daria," Mr. Mychuda told The Day's reporter.

The girls lived in normal families, were good pupils, and took part in amateur performances. Nothing in their behavior showed that they could do such terrible thing, say their teachers. There is information that they saw on television a report from Russia on the burial of the three girls who also jumped off a multistory building. Could the reporter have unwittingly convinced them that there is nothing further, that the parents will remain grief-stricken till the end of their lives?

Senior investigator Mychuda diligently studies the acquaintances of the deceased: "where they lived and studied." That fatal Sunday evening Olena and Daria talked to three girls and a boy - not their classmates, all their own age or a little older. When the girls said they would never see them again, the teenagers interpreted the phrase as a gloomy joke.

Mr. Mychuda says that in the school where the girls studied there is psychologist's office, that in Netishyn there are sports clubs and amateur centers for children. However he agrees that nowadays everyone is busy, occupied with everyday concerns - for example, people made a tent town in front of the city administration demanding their pay. And perhaps this is why the young generation shuns older people. Or maybe it is just the other way round, that the older generation shuns the younger? The tragedy is still so fresh, as the graves made in the cemetery last Tuesday. Will it be understood? Will people do everything they can to prevent its recurrence?

By Mykhailo VASYLEVSKY, The Day
  Juvenile suicides rise in Ukraine "Today the problem of juvenile suicides is one of the most acute in Ukraine," says head of the Toxicology Department of Okhmatdyt (Maternity and Childhood Protection) specialized Ukrainian children's hospital Borys Sheiman. "While in 1996 20 children were brought to our Department after suicide attempts, in 1998 it was 51. They are mainly between the ages of eleven and fourteen who took poisons from household medicine chests. They point to various motives for attempting suicide. While ten years ago the main reason for suicide was an unhappy romance, now it is loneliness and lack of parental attention. It is interesting that girls, who are more emotional than boys, commit suicides more often."

"When children take a box of pills or jump off the eleventh floor they do not think primarily about death," the chair of Psychiatry Department of the Kyiv Medical Academy of Post-Graduate Education Valery Kuznetsov believes. "Doctors call it 'demonstrative suicide' used by a child to show the world its protest. If the parents could notice their children's mood on time, there would be fewer such tragedies.

"Of course, disease, schizophrenia for example, also can be one of the reasons for committing suicide, when a child hears 'voices' ordering it to die. But such cases are extremely rare. The Netishyn tragedy is not typical either. Perhaps the situation can be described as induced psychosis: one of the girls took the lead in suicide, and the other for some reason was under her influence."

The doctors could not save two girls from Netishyn, but in most cases they succeed in resuscitating children attempting suicide.

Borys Sheiman told The Day's reporter: "For several weeks after an attempt to die the child is still in a depressed, suicidal state, and may repeat the action. And if the first attempt of suicide is caused by desire to make the child's problems known, the second time the child really wants to die and often is successful. That is why the parents should be very attentive to their son or daughter and do everything possible for the child to feel moral and spiritually comfortable."

By Inna ZOLOTUKHINA, The Day