VietNamNet Bridge - Ten percent of students are at risk of suffering serious depression, a report says. And 90 percent of students who need counseling have problems because of pressure from their parents or because of their parents’ divorce. 

The information that an 11th grader at Chu Van An High School for the Gifted in Lang Son province jumped into the river to commit suicide stunned the public. Tran Hoang H, an excellent student, killed himself just because of a bad mark he received.

Phung Ngoc Tuan, director of the Student Affairs Division under the Hanoi Education and Training Department, called these ‘regrettable incidents’, and said that students were under pressure to be good students to satisfy their parents.

He also noted that many students committed suicide because they were suspected of stealing class funds or fabricated images posted on Facebook.

Experts have voiced their concerns over escalating school violence, but few solutions have been proposed and agencies cannot agree on how to punish the perpetrators.

Students nowadays have many psychological problems due to relations with friends, teachers and family members, and temptation of electronic games and family violence. 

The students who have these problems, Tuan said, need to share their thoughts and receive advice from teachers and psychology experts. And that is why school counseling rooms need to be established. 

Bui Thi Kieu, a psychology teacher at Marie Curie high school in HCM City, said she had received a lot of requests from students to help them solve their problems via phone and Facebook.

Kieu noted that 90 percent of the students asking for advice have problems due to conflicts in family relationships.

The school conducted a small survey and found that in one class, 50 percent of students have divorced parents. Meanwhile, 5-10 percent of students are at risk of depression.

The survey results have been the same for the last three consecutive years.

In Hanoi, according to Nguyen Tung Lam, a renowned educator, headmaster of Dinh Tien Hoang High School, in some classes 30-40 percent of students have divorced parents.

Tuan from the Hanoi Education and Training Department stressed that schools have to take responsibility for students’ health and psychology.

In Hanoi, more than 20 schools have joined a project to provide school psychological counseling to students. There are 1,000 existing schools in the city.

Kieu of Marie Curie School said that three students with severe problems had been helped by timely intervention. 

ANTD