“Your life is important. Therefore, you should not die by suicide.” Such sound arguments may at times take the children who are near the edge of death to the furthest point for which suicide prevention and educational endeavors are expected to lead them.

Kenji Kawano discusses the difficulties of suicide prevention based on his work experience at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry and his involvement in national suicide prevention policies. In particular, it is said that suicide prevention measures in Japan targeting young people in their 10s to 20s are far behind other age groups. “As suicide cases suddenly jumped to 30,000 in 1998, measures against suicide have become a major concern for the country. While middle-aged and elderly men were the focus at that time, since then, the suicide rate in each age group has been declining, except for the teenage group that showed no sign of decline to date,” he says.

In the meantime, the Basic Act on Suicide Prevention was enacted in 2006, while the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) issued a manual titled Sustainable Child Suicide Prevention that Teachers Should Know in 2009 and another titled Emergency Response Manual for when a Child Suicide Occurs the following year. It is clear that the national government has also taken measures against suicide of young people in recent years, as these publications indicate. Another similar effort is seen in their 2014 manual A Guide to Introducing Suicide Prevention Education at Schools—Suicide Prevention You Want to Convey to Children. Parallel to these efforts, Kawano’s research group has developed a suicide prevention education program called “GRIP” to be implemented in schools.

The most outstanding feature of GRIP is its focus on group support, such as the classroom and the school itself. In the manuals published by MEXT mentioned earlier, learning about suicide and techniques to prevent it are strongly emphasized. However, the reality in the educational setting is that teachers tend to avoid talking about suicide because they fear they are inadvertently introducing suicide to children as an option in bringing the issue up. “What becomes a problem even more is that educating children using phrases such as ‘suicide is not good’ or ‘let us cherish our lives’ has an implicit danger, as these phrases tend to come across children who are already at high risk for suicide as a bunch of pretty words being shoved down their throats by people who have no idea what is really going on, and thus be rejected in such a way that the intention and purpose of the education would not reach them,” says Kawano.

In contrast, GRIP’s aim and purpose is to “create an environment where students and teachers can support each other.” By applying psychological theories and techniques, Kawano and others designed the program in a way that the whole class could accept the lessons and learnings without impediments for the children who really need the support. Its emphasis is not only on creating a supportive environment where students themselves can discuss issues when faced with difficulties but also on establishing a relationship of trust between them and adults whom they can turn to when they need to discuss any difficult situations they may face. The program is designed to be far more implementable in real contexts as it focuses on the class as a form of group support. As a result, it can provide an effective suicide prevention education without making “education about suicide” its premise.

Another notable feature of GRIP is that it takes a gradual approach. The program starts with teacher training and then deepens learning over four deliberate stages: (1) to become an objective observer of one’s own inner state, (2) to cope with behavior, (3) how to discuss, and (4) to make decisions in conditions that are hard to handle. In each stage, students and teachers use games and group work so that the class and the school can become the focus of attention.