Suicide top killer of young Chinese: newspaper

BEIJING (Reuters) - Suicide is the top killer of young Chinese, accounting for more than a quarter of deaths in the 15 to 34-year-old age group last year, the official China Daily said on Tuesday.

The stress of living in a highly competitive and fast changing society is taking a rising toll on the country's young, many of them only children both pampered and pressured by parents and grandparents.

Statistics from the Chinese Association of Mental Health showed suicide was the leading killer of young people in 2006, causing 26 percent of deaths. The association did not give a total number of deaths.

In 2003, the last year for which figures are available, over a quarter of a million people committed suicide in China and another two million attempted suicide, the paper said.

In comparison the United States had 31,500 suicides in the same year -- a far lower rate, even taking into account the country's smaller population, the paper added.

Many of the deaths in China are among teenagers, with a survey of more than 140,000 high school students finding that around 20 percent said they had considered suicide and 6.5 percent said they had made concrete plans to kill themselves.

Since 2002 the proportion of teenagers considering each of the three steps toward suicide -- considering it, making a plan and taking action -- had all risen, the report by the Child and Teenage Health Research Institute at Peking University found.

Around half the children said they had felt lonely in the previous year and 40 percent had recurrent sleeping problems.

The problems were due in part to a cultural unwillingness to discuss feelings, relationship difficulties and the lack of channels for exploring self-identity, researchers found.

Asked to picture their ideal world, they drew themselves without uniforms or regulated hairstyles, free from parents' and teachers' controls, the paper added.