Suicide Watch

As Richard Lieberman inches his car through traffic in Los Angeles, his beeper and his cell phone buzz in unison. In any given month, Lieberman fields hundreds of calls from teachers, principals, and counselors working for the Los Angeles Unified School District, home to 700 schools. Today, the callers have some disturbing news to report: One student has shown a morbid drawing to a teacher; another slashed her arms; and a third is talking about hearing voices “that are making her do things.” These kinds of calls are not unusual for Lieberman, whose job description is simple: Keep children from killing themselves. “They call me Suicide Man,” says the director of the district’s Suicide Prevention Unit.

Lieberman doesn’t work solo. He’s backed by a district-run mental-health facility, a city teeming with psychological clinics, and a $14 million annual budget. The investment appears to be paying off: The district has seen the number of suicides among its 700,000 students drop from 35 in 1989 to 19 in 1997 (the most recent year for which figures are available).

In contrast, the national suicide rate among teenagers has more than tripled since 1960. It’s so high, in fact, that suicide is a bigger cause of death for people age 19 and younger than cancer, heart disease, AIDS, pneumonia, lung disease, and birth defects combined, according to Tom Simon, a suicide researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But despite the uphill trend, only one other school district—Florida’s Miami-Dade County system, with 350,000 students—has someone on staff who...