Recently public attention has been drawn to the increasing number of people joining Facebook Groups bringing into contact young people with suicidal tendencies. One of these groups saw its membership rise to some 200, with one calling for mass suicide on December 21. Police technological experts are trying to track down the person who started that group.

Some of these groups may have been benign in their intent when they first appeared. They were motivated perhaps by a desire to test the limits of freedom of speech and to challenge authorities more than to enlist people to commit suicide. Nonetheless the groups have been taken seriously. This is because many of our youths are indeed under a great deal of pressure and are extremely vulnerable. Suicidal tendencies are contagious, and a concerted effort is required to reverse the trend.

What is more important and more fundamental, however, is not so much taking action against the initiators of these groups, but immunizing our younger generations from suicidal and self-destructive tendencies. We want our young people to value their lives, and to respect and value the lives of others at the same time. The prevalence of smoking and substance abuse among our youth is a sign that we have failed to build up the inner strength of our youngsters.

Lingnan University has been conducting happiness surveys in Hong Kong since 2005, and we have consistently found that education in Hong Kong has failed to make people happier. Indeed, other things being equal, a university graduate is more likely to be unhappy, than a person who lacks a university education. We have found validity in a "happiness formula" comprising love, insight (wisdom), fortitude, and engagement (LIFE). In the 2009 survey, which was conducted from November 9-13, it was found that university graduates actually score lower in love and in wisdom, even though they appear to score higher in fortitude and in engaging in activities.

It is notable that in Hong Kong, university graduates generally have lower Love Index scores and Wisdom Index scores than non-university graduates. The Love Index score, indeed, was only 7.44, as compared with 7.80 for secondary school graduates and 7.83 for primary school graduates. The Wisdom Index score was 7.05, as compared with 7.11 and 7.17 for secondary and primary school graduates respectively. This clearly shows that our schools, in particular secondary schools and our universities, have failed to enhance students' care and concern about their families and their society, and to increase their wisdom. They have a distorted sense of what makes a successful life - that success means relative success or at least doing better than average; they feel neglected and not loved. They are responding to this neglect and not being loved by not loving and caring for others. Committing suicide and telling the world that they want to commit suicide or otherwise hurt themselves is a more extreme way of responding to this neglect and expressing their sense of failure and frustration, which the "culture of relative success" has engendered.

The rise in drug abuse and the emergence of suicide groups on the Internet are signs of the same problem: a failure in the education system and a misguided but commonly shared notion about what constitutes success, which unfortunately is being propagated and perpetuated by our institutions and some of our policies, our parents, our personal and social relationships, and even by popular culture.

The author is director of Centre for Public Policy Studies, Lingnan University

(HK Edition 12/04/2009 page1)