“The reasons for suicide here are many,” said Boris Polozhiy, a psychiatrist at the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. “Social factors, medical factors, psychological factors. So it needs to be solved systematically. All of this work needs to be coordinated.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “in Russia this system does not yet exist.”

Under Russian law, every school must have at least one psychologist on staff, and there is a national telephone hot line for people to call if they are having suicidal thoughts. But beyond those measures, little effort has been made to address the problem at the federal level.

In February, Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, called the situation “catastrophic.”

“It’s a subject which officials, especially bureaucrats, don’t like,” he said. “There is a special department in the Ministry of Health, which is supposed to carry out preventive measures, but so far they only collect the statistical data, information and figures. And the figures are horrible because behind every figure there is the life of a child.”

Lawmakers have focused on the role played by social networks and news media coverage of the year’s cluster of deaths. After public pressure, Vkontakte, Russia’s largest social networking site, began deleting community groups that were giving instructions on methods of committing suicide. Graphic coverage of the acts on state television — vertigo-inducing rooftop views and in at least one instance a shot of a bloodied body covered by a sheet — has largely disappeared.

But Kirill Khlomov, who heads Crossroads, a Moscow center that provides counseling for at-risk teenagers, said that the problems run deeper. “When the media talks about suicide, it always sounds like the answer’s right there,” he said. “Just shut Facebook and then everything will be fine. It is just not so.”

Mr. Khlomov pointed to the vacuum left by Soviet youth organizations like the Young Pioneers, which used to provide social structure for adolescents.