Parents and teachers should be more aware of the effects EastEnders and similar soaps have on young people's outlooks, a conference on suicide prevention in schools warned yesterday.
Broadcaster and psychotherapist Gareth O' Callaghan said children as young as four were being exposed to soap operas where the story lines were often "appalling".
A constant barrage of soaps between the hours of 6 and 9pm was bad news every half hour, "delivering bouts of negativity like a bullet", while good old-fashioned family films were pushed to 1am in the morning, he added.
Studies had already proved the immune system "took a pounding" during negative soap programmes, Mr O'Callaghan said. "Someone as young as four years watching that becomes indoctrinated, almost addicted."
Fifteen years ago EastEnders would be X-rated, added O'Callaghan, author of A Day Called Hope, an account of his own battle with depression.
Speaking at the opening day of a conference for school principals, guidance counsellors and teachers organised by the Irish Association of Suicidology, the broadcaster said we need to go back to finding good role models for our young.
Where his generation had Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, this generation had Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Eminem and Paris Hilton "all people who have messed up their lives".
The school curriculum should not be buying into "the EastEnders' frame of mind" by dumbing down its English papers for instance, and parents and teachers need to teach children to be "more selective", he said.
The "cold hard truth" about suicide was that children as young as nine or 10 knew they could take their own lives and while a suicide could not be stopped, it might be prevented.
Shay Bannon, school principal of Ardscoil na mBráithre in Clonmel, who has developed a leadership and training programme for school principals and managers, said boys' schools in particular had to make sure young males understood how to deal with emotional issues.
The Junior Cert Social Personal Health Education and Civic Social and Political Education programmes needed urgently to be extended to the Leaving Cert cycle.
New Jersey clinical social worker Maureen Underwood said students were often in the know about risk to their peers, but the fear of breaking peer confidence prevented them from speaking out.
"It's so important to get the message to kids, that suicide is not something that you keep a secret - it's better to have an angry friend than a dead friend," Ms Underwood said.
The conference also heard that about 8,600 people had presented to hospital having deliberately self-harmed in 2005 and half of these were under 30, with many in their teens.
The true self-harm figure was likely to be 10 times higher, because large numbers would not have attended hospital.