Prevention: Los Angeles Reaches Out To Students With Systemwide Approach

By Jessica Portner

Los Angeles

For a school employee, Richard Lieberman has an unusual job description: Keep children from killing themselves.

"They call me Suicide Man," the upbeat director of the Suicide Prevention Unit for the Los Angeles Unified School District said recently.

Nothing in his school psychology courses in college quite prepared Mr. Lieberman for the task of buoying the spirits of children in a district with a student population of 700,000, the size of a large city. But, with the help of a district-run mental-health clinic, a city teeming with psychological clinics, and a $14 million annual investment from the district’s budget in mental-health services, the number of suicides in the district dropped from 35 in 1989...