The government said Friday it plans to introduce a service this year that will inform parents of their children’s suicidal symptoms, as part of measures to prevent suicide among students.
Under the plan, parents will receive a smartphone message when “suicide”-related keywords are detected in messages that their children exchange with friends on social network services and in records of their Internet searches using smartphone devices, the education ministry said.
Both parents and students should install government-developed smartphone apps in order to use the service, it added.
“If the service is adopted in all schools across the country, parents will be able to sense and respond to signs of their children committing suicide more swiftly than before,” a ministry official said.
According to the ministry data, the number of students who committed suicide from 2009 to 2014 came to 878. After peaking at 202 in 2009, the figure has been on a steady decline to 123 in 2013 and 118 last year.
About 40 percent of the students took their own lives because of a family discord or other family-related problems while depression over low school scores and school violence and bullying were the main reason for the deaths of 10.7 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively. (Yonhap)
