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Essayist Anne Taylor Fleming considers an unusual high school course designed to help young people cope with life.

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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: We've been doing a lot of soul searching about kids who kill. We look at their pictures and shake our heads. How does it happen? Where do they come from? What combination of bad parenting or non-parenting, of access to guns and exposure to video violence or something else altogether turned these baby-faced kids into killers? These are the same questions that are being asked about kids who kill not others but themselves. We read about so-called suicide clusters, the groups of young people in a given neighborhood or suburb or small town who take their own lives one after the other in a painful parody of follow the leader.

The latest locale is the small middle class capital city in South Dakota, Pierre, which boasts but one high school, one hospital, and one shopping mall, and an adolescent suicide rate that's off the charts. In the last three years eleven people from ages 12 to 23 have taken their own lives-eight of them teenagers. There have been other clusters in the past few years in Plano, Texas, in Westchester County, New York, and South Boston. It hits rich kids and poor kids, all colors, all nationalities.

And even if the teen suicide rate is only half of adults, there has, nonetheless, been a huge increase, a 120 percent jump since 1980 in the suicide rate among 10 to 14 year olds. Among young blacks, the rate has doubled and is now the third leading cause of black teenage deaths. It is precisely that age group who pass through this classroom every year at the Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California, near where I grew up.

Such a class, called Life Skills, would have been unthinkable back then. We had our heads on math and history and occasionally the opposite sex. Nobody was talking about life skills, about self worth, and drug use, and gang problems, and sexually transmitted diseases, and yes, suicide, precisely all the things that Al Trundle talks about every day of his life to seventh graders, who lives seem much more complex than ours ever were and scarier.

AL TRUNDLE: What might be going through your mind as a kid who doesn't get a whole lot, Jess?

YOUNG GIRL: If I kill myself, maybe people will start to realize who I am, have a moment of, you know, peace with me, people will start to realize, you know, what a great person I was and stuff like that.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Listening to these kids is to be reminded of the loneliness, the awkwardness of changing bodies and bad skin and peer pressure. Who are you? What are you? Have a smoke. Have a drink. Have a kid. In some ways, of course, it's just the age-old drama of being on the cusp of adolescence. But now it comes with a new twist: often absent parents and their opposite, over-demanding parents, and much more lethal temptations-drugs and gangs and guns, the weapon of choice for kids who kill themselves.

AL TRUNDLE: How many of these things have ever caused you to maybe feel so overwhelmed that you really started thinking, maybe, gosh, the only way out for me, the only way to get over my depression, the only way to get-keep from being teased and harassed is for me to take my own life? And I want you to raise your hand. I just want you to think about.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: So these 12 and 13 year olds talk in a safe place about conflict points and about learning to accept yourself with all your hopes and dreams and imperfections. And if this seems in any way too trendy, it doesn't feel that way sitting at one of these small tables.

AL TRUNDLE: You're going to write a letter to an imaginary friend, so to speak. A friend who's written you a letter explaining to you that they are thinking about taking their life. This friend is asking for your help, so you decide to write them back. In that letter, I want you to state your views, your understanding of suicide.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: It feels as basic as can be, as elemental as spelling in today's world, a way to help at least some of our kids fight off the darkness that sometimes threatens to swallow up whole a young life. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.

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