Most youngsters would rather trust a friend, who would do everything possible to nip the suicidal whim in the bud. While an expert is professional, a personal friend provides the shoulder to cry on, often literally. That person would sit with you throughout the night, for days or weeks, until you are out of the woods. He or she would not smirk at you for your imprudence, and may even risk failing grades or losing a job because of the full-time engagement with you. That person would treat the matter just as seriously, but be rational while you are temporarily unhinged.

I'm sure this is not just a cultural phenomenon, but this kind of bonding seems more common among the young. Then of course parents are the most reliable of emotional pillars, even though they may scold you for being childish. Unfortunately, Zeng was deficient in this respect. His parents divorced when he was little, leaving him to his mother's care, and his mother moved away after she remarried. He grew up with his maternal grandmother.

In other words, he was like one of those tens of millions of "left-behind children" whose parents are absent mostly for job reasons. That absence, coupled with the usual rebelliousness of adolescence, tends to make them more vulnerable than their peers to emotional and growth-related difficulties. While regular teenagers may have several layers of safety net to catch them when they stumble, be it friends, families or schools, the black hole that is the Internet seemed to be Zeng's only resort.

Of course, I have to caution myself against too much conjecture. The public knows too little about his family or his mental world to make intelligent hard-and-fast comments on the case. But as a rule of thumb, youngsters of that age need several cushions to help them cope through the rollercoaster of growing pains. Most pull through even bigger ordeals stronger than before; some survive with scars; a few may not make it. We may not be able to help every one of them, but we should not stop weaving that safety net so that it will catch more and more of them if they fall.

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily.

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