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Last week, twin brothers were run over by a train between the Klyazma and Tarasovskaya commuter stations in the Moscow region, RIA Novosti reported. According to investigators, the brothers committed suicide.
Early reports claimed that empty glue tubes were found on the bodies, prompting speculation that the victims could have been under the influence of toxic substances. Later, that version of events was discarded. "Reports that these young people were drug addicts are not true," Tatyana Morozova, a police department spokesperson, was quoted as saying by Komsomolskaya Pravda. "During the examination of the victims' belongings, half-empty glue tubes were indeed discovered, but the young people studied mechanics and chemical technology of wood processing and naturally could have had various related items on them."
"So far, investigators know that on November 25, the Moscow - Sergiyev Posad commuter train ran over two young people who, having seen the approaching train, lay down next to each other, putting their heads on the tracks," Morozova said. "The engineer warned them with a signal blast, but it was too late to stop the train."
The victims, 19-year-old Andrei and Sergei Mishin, were close to each other and didn't abuse drugs or alcohol, their parents told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The issue of teenage suicide remains acute in Russia. According to a UNICEF report, Russia's teenage suicide rate is higher than in any other country, while the average rate of suicide is more than three times higher than the world median.
One of the reasons for suicide among teenagers has to do with depression, reads the report, with incidents of clinical depression among young people estimated at 20 per cent, compared to five per cent in economically developed European countries. Some 45 per cent of teenage girls and 27 per cent of teenage boys in Russia have thought about suicide, according to the report.
Russian officials also provide alarming figures. "We collected [teenage and child suicide] figures from last year in [all of] the country's regions," Pavel Astakhov, the Children Rights Commissioner for the President of the Russian Federation, told Interfax earlier this year. "1,800 [teenagers] committed suicide."
Astakhov said that suicide was most common among 14 to 17-year-old teenagers from single-parent households. He added that this figure will likely remain roughly the same for now, as "no one has dealt with [the issue] before, and no one deals with it now."
The Emergencies Ministry is running a hotline for urgent psychological assistance, which also targets teenagers on the verge of suicide. And although the hotline is advertised on the Moscow metro, several attempts to reach the hotline, which is supposed to operate 24 hours a day, proved futile on a recent Saturday.
Mikhail, a 19-year-old Moscow resident who tried to commit suicide a few years ago, agreed to speak to The Moscow News on the condition that his last name not be used. "I had just broken up with my girlfriend - we dated for a long time - and thought that my life was over," he said. "It sounds stupid now, but then, at that moment, it made absolute sense."
Mikhail pointed out that he has since then found out that depression runs in his family, and that his grandfather had committed suicide.
"I didn't know about it before, but obviously, after I tried to kill myself and was hospitalised, my parents wanted to be honest with me about what happened to him," Mikhail said. "It probably sounds strange, but it was eventually comforting to realise that some hereditary [factor] had played a role in how I felt."
Mikhail said that although he doesn't believe there is a miracle cure for depression, he's confident that he will have an easier time of it than his grandfather. "I think depression was rarely spoken about when he was young," he said. "Today, you don't feel like a freak if you admit you have depression."
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