Fifteen per cent of boys think their lives are not worth living most of the time, according to the Eastern Health Board's annual report on its child-care and family support services.
The report also says the EHB is experiencing an "unrelenting demand" for residential care places for children, but that it is unable to meet the demand.
The EHB provides health and social services in Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare.
Nearly one child in five (18 per cent) has a psychiatric disorder, according to the section of the report which deals with its child and adolescent psychiatric services.
A study conducted by its staff "found that 15 per cent of boys thought their lives were not worth living most of the time, and 18 per cent thought their lives were not worth living sometimes".
"In children attending Child and Family Centres, 14 per cent of attenders were found to be depressed," it says. "Close links were found between disturbed children and parental mental illness, parental marital disharmony and marital breakdown, marital violence and poverty."
Deaths by suicide among young people have increased every year for the past three years, according to the report. Last year three children aged 14 or under committed suicide, it shows, quoting figures from the Central Statistics Office. A more detailed breakdown of the ages of the three children was not available yesterday evening. There were no such deaths in that age group in 1996.
In the 15-24 age group, 32 people killed themselves compared with 26 in 1996.
There was a small reduction in the number of cases of suspected child abuse reported to the EHB last year, it says. In all, 2,082 suspected cases were reported, compared with 2,158 cases in 1996.
The highest number of confirmed cases of abuse (346) were of neglect. Mothers who neglect their children often get no support from family, friends or neighbours, are anxious and have low self-esteem and sometimes have a drink problem, it says. "Infants who are neglected have acute feeding problems and are temperamentally difficult."
The next-largest category of confirmed reports was of sexual abuse (228), followed by physical abuse (179) and emotional abuse (80).
At the end of the year, investigations into 634 alleged cases of abuse were continuing.
"A feature during the year was the unrelenting demand for residential placements, especially emergency admissions," it says. "Despite the best efforts of staff to maintain children in their own family, many children require alternative care, and there are not yet sufficient numbers of placements to meet the demand."
Yet of the 363 beds available in the EHB region, only 75 per cent are full at any one time. It says this is a matter of concern and is being examined. Meanwhile, says the EHB's Child Care Advisory Committee in the report, recruitment of foster parents is being delayed. "A fundamental difficulty regarding the recruitment of new foster carers is, not the availability of such families, but the availability of social workers to undertake the assessments. It is evident that, for understandable reasons, social work managers give priority to child-abuse cases. This results in a situation where people are waiting for many months to be assessed as foster carers."
It recommends that a number of new social work posts be devoted solely to fostering. It also seeks an increase in fostering allowances.
Other matters covered by the report include:
Thirty-eight per cent of mothers in the region breastfeed their babies.
Non-marital births (which include unmarried partners living together and single parents) accounted for 32 per cent of all births in the region last year.
Assessing applicants for foreign adoptions now takes six to nine months.