Bridgend suicides

[Mike Covell]

Hi Sam,

Although I have been to Wales several times in the past I have mostly visited towns along the coast, and spent most of the time hill walking, hikking and getting arrested in fields of sheep.

How far away from this are you?

Mike

[Sam Flynn]

Hi Sam, how far away from this are you?

Just about 20 miles, Mike. I have relatives in Bridgend, and I'm quite familiar with the town.

[Mike Covell]

Pretty close then!

I cannot imagine the state the families must be in, especially as these kids had their whole lives before them.

Several years ago I was in a very serious relationship that broke down and was at my lowest, but it was then I realised all the good things in my life.

I hope the Samaritans get some good vibes going and make people realise there is more, you just got to know were to look for it.

Mike

[DarkPassenger]

Let me see............

Young people........check.

Usual peer pressures.............check

Society where they will probably never amount to anything they see as important...............check

A maelstrom of teenage hormones..............check.

developong sexualities.................check.

Insane materialistic pressures of the consumer society we live in.............check.

Readily available drink and drugs..................check.

And therefore this suicide blackspot (which actually isnt), defined by the same media that generated many of the intolerable pressures youngesters are under these days, must be the result of video game violence and shadowy "suicide predators" . Of course!

The saddest thing about this is that the media is making so much money out of it and the rest of us are swinging towards validating that money-making by appearing to swallow the rubbish printed.

Must be really comforting for the parents to know that their childs death is at least serving the tabloids well.

p

Agree

[Stephen Thomas]

And therefore this suicide blackspot (which actually isnt)

It looks like that to me , MrP.

Where is the particular comparison?

[Sam Flynn]

It looks like [it's a suicide blackspot] to me , MrP

Hi Stephen,

I hope that what I've put in square brackets there doesn't misrepresent what you said, in which case I agree that twice as many young suicides in the town in one year as the six previous years put together constitutes something of an anomaly. In addition, the teenage hormone hypothesis isn't particularly compelling, given that the average age of the deceased was 19.75 (median 19.5, mode 20), and several were aged 20 or over.

[Mr Poster]

hi ho

At worst....its a black time for suicides in that town.

That does not make it a suicide blackspot unless somone can show that there has been a statistically higher number of suicides there than the national average for a significant period of time............then it is not blackspot.

p

[Sam Flynn]

hi ho

At worst....its a black time for suicides in that town.

That does not make it a suicide blackspot unless somone can show that there has been a statistically higher number of suicides there than the national average for a significant period of time............then it is not blackspot.

Since when was the national average a yardstick for the local average, MrP? Where would you suggest we drew the line? Waco?

[Pilgrim]

BBC News, Thursday 7 February - Suicide spate 'masks' wider worry

The MP for Bridgend has said the recent spate of suicides in her constituency masked a high level of suicides across the whole of Wales.

In an MPs' debate Madeleine Moon called for a suicide prevention strategy for Wales, saying it had a "significantly higher rate than in England".

~~~

BBC News, Wednesday 20 February - Shocked community seeks answers

From 1996 to 2006, Bridgend county had the highest rates of suicide in Wales among males aged 15 to 24, although it was only sixth in Wales for all males aged over 15.

~~~

[Pilgrim]

An Army of Evil Beings.

Times Online, June 2 2007.

A boy of 15 lay down in front of a train to commit suicide after being teased at school about his sexuality, an inquest was told yesterday.

Moments before he died, Jonathan Reynolds sent harrowing text messages to his family telling them that they were not to blame for what was about to happen. A passer-by saw him holding the mobile as he lay down on the tracks in front of a train travelling at 85mph (136km/h) through Pencoed railway station near Bridgend, South Wales.

In his last text message sent to his father, Mark, and his 14-year-old sister, Samantha, the teenager wrote: “Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them.

“I hope they rot in hell 4 what they made me do. They know who they are.”

He added: “None of you blame urself mum, dad, Sam and the rest of my family. This is not because of you.”

A postmortem examination showed that Jonathan, who achieved a grade A in his GCSE Welsh oral exam on the day he died, had a blood-alcohol level three and a half times the legal limit for driving.

The inquest jury sitting at Merthyr Tydfil Magistrates’ Court was told that Jonathan, a pupil at Bryntirion Comprehensive School, had argued on the phone with two friends, Saphra Hayes and Nicola Kennett, on the evening he died.

Both girls told police that they ended their conversations with Jonathan on good terms. His mother, Caroline, told the inquest that she believed that the arguments had been a “catalyst” for his actions. She said: “He was, to all intents and purposes, in for the night, and then following a few angry phone calls he changed his mind and went out.

South Wales Police investigated Jonathan’s death because of the nature of his final text message, but Detective Inspector Russell Warwick said: “There were no issues that constituted criminality.”

Although Jonathan had not complained of being bullied at school, Detective Chief Inspector Sandra England, of the British Transport Police, said that weeks earlier he had confided to a friend that he was gay.”

~~~

"One does not commit suicide by oneself. In the case of suicide, there must be an army of evil beings to cause the body to make the gesture against nature, that of taking its own life. And I believe that there is always someone else at the moment of extreme death to strip us of our own life."

Antonin Artaud - Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.

[Mr Poster]

Hi ho SamF

Well.the national average will have to do....unless you want to play Texas sharpshooter and keep selecting yardsticks until one suits your point of view?

The fact remains........."suicide blackspot" is being marketed by the media in an attempt to engender interest and sell papers.

Right across the water from wales is County Kildare. Between 1995 and 2002 there were 102 suicides. Probably more as the coroner over there records many deaths not as sucicide but "in accordance with medical evidence" (ie. he died of a fall rather than suicide by leaping of the local church.). 84% of them were men between 20 and 30. (A study of suicides in Kildare, 1995–2002. Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine, Volume 11, Issue 6, Pages 289-298 C. McGovern, D. Cusack).

The Irish media do not and never have, for Kildare or any other high suicide area like Sligo or Donegal speculate as to cults or anything else and maintain a sober, respectful coverage perhaps once a year of the suicide problem in parts of the country.

The media in Britain started talking about "suicide blackspots" and "cults" and made what wasnt a startling anomalous problem into exactly what they wanted - hysterical headlines.

Why wouldn't kids from a depressed area, with no future, no outlet, no chance of recognition figure out that topping yourself was a handy way of gaining some kind of fame after seeing the shrieking of the press, the shrining of previous victims websites and so on?

Even the parents in the town are blaming the media. Not videos, not cults, not drugs.....but the media. "Local MP Madeleine Moon said the media were "now part of the problem"." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7253788.stm

There was no blackspot. There is no blackspot. Just a depressed, poor, unemployed town with a high suicide rate. Like many regions. No cults, no video games, no death metal music.

But the focus of the media, and the desire to sell newspapers, has inflated the usual rate of suicides into exactly what they wanted.

In fact this thread is in some small way contributing to the very thing it finds so odd.......it keeps talking about it, keeps mentioning "blackspots", keeps the attention up.

When what we should do if we were half way smart is to stop squeezing this boil and making it bigger and redder and increasing the chance of other boils and just leave it alone to go away by itself.

So I wont be posting here again. Its as distasteful as the redtops coverage of the whole thing.

p

[Mr Poster]

But before I go...an eminently sensible, rational, view from the always sensible Irish papers : http://www.independent.ie/world-news...h-1296781.html

Bridgend lies at the bottom of three valleys that are among the most economically deprived areas in the UK; many of those who cannot find work move down into the town, where they merely add to its unenviable unemployment rate of 6.4 per cent, the third worst in Wales and twice the national average.

Privately, many of the borough's 130,000 proud inhabitants admit that socio-economic problems cannot be ruled out as a factor in some of the recent suicides: Wales already has the worst suicide rate in the UK.

Yet Bridgend is no better or worse than scores of other small towns up and down Britain that are struggling to find a sense of purpose, decades after their traditional industries dried up. And children aged 15, 16 and 17 are unlikely to kill themselves because they are worried about losing their job.

In fact, Bridgend is by no means unique in experiencing a seemingly inexplicable "cluster'' of suicides among youngsters, each of whom appears to have been influenced by preceding tragedies.

The phenomenon has occurred with such regularity that psychologists have given it a name -- Werther Syndrome, after the protagonist in Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, who kills himself. The novel was banned in some European countries after its publication 200 years ago, because of a rash of suicides among young men who had read it.

While today's teenagers are more likely to be influenced by internet memorial sites or TV news coverage, the pattern has been repeating itself ever since.

Darren Matthews, the director of the Bridgend branch of the charity Samaritans, subscribes to the Werther Syndrome theory.

"What we are dealing with is a cluster of suicides that has spread like a contagion. They are imitative suicides.

"It's a particular problem among young people because they are more vulnerable. They may not have a lot of life experience, so they may not realise there are avenues they can take. The contagion happens through personal communication, with people talking to each other about the events that have happened, and through the media.

"They have to be vulnerable and having suicidal thoughts in the first place, but may not have expressed those thoughts openly. Hearing about another suicide may give them what they need to complete the act, such as a description of the method used," he said.

Copycat suicides among teenagers have been studied widely in America. Dr David Shaffer, a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University, said after one spate of suicides in New Jersey: "The news coverage of teenage suicides can portray the victims as martyrs of sorts. The more sentimentalised it is, the more legitimate -- even heroic -- it may seem to some teenagers.''

Dr Shaffer says 20 per cent of older teenagers have suicidal thoughts at some point, "so there is a large latent population who have given it some thought and can be pushed into doing it if they see other people killing themselves and acquiring notoriety and fame".

He explains so-called suicide clusters often occur in semi-rural locations, partly because teenagers tend to know each other better than in big cities and identify more closely with other victims.

But wherever the suicides happen, the underlying causes tend to be the same. "In the case of young people,'' says Darren Matthews, "the typical problems are bullying, self-harm, problems with sexuality, exam stress and relationships."

No talk of cults or anything else. Just recognition that Bridgend is neither unique, nor particularly shocking and that "The news coverage of teenage suicides can portray the victims as martyrs of sorts. The more sentimentalised it is, the more legitimate -- even heroic -- it may seem to some teenagers.''


Odd isnt it...............that some media can adopt sober and down to earth attitudes and others just cannot?

And that threads like these spring up like toadstools in the fetid manure served up by the British papers and by the ticker tape headlines of SKY news.

p

[Sam Flynn]

Hi ho SamF

Well.the national average will have to do....unless you want to play Texas sharpshooter and keep selecting yardsticks until one suits your point of view?

How dare you.

Twice as many suicides in a small region in one year compared to the previous six put together. The national average - or my "point of view" (of which I have none on this case, for your information) - has nothing to do with this. There appears to be a local blip, which might not be so easily explained away as "teenage hormones" (etc) as you imagined, especially when you didn't check the facts about the victims' ages in the first place.

I find the press coverage rather distasteful, too, and I agree that there may yet be no "cause for alarm" in this particular case - it's too early to say, and it's right to exercise caution.

However, when you start rattling off a list of unresearched "explanations" to support your foregone conclusions, then you deserve to be pulled up. If anything, firing such glib pronouncements from the hip really isn't that far removed from what the press are doing.

[Mr Poster]

Hmmmmmm

How dare I? How dare I what?

I suggest you untwist your knickers and try and adopt a rational view.

1. if you look at the latest WHO global statistics for suicide, you will quickly see that Wales and indeed the UK hve no problem at all with suicide when expressed relative to countries that do have real suicide problems.

2.

There appears to be a local blip, which might not be so easily explained away as "teenage hormones" (etc) as you imagined, especially when you didn't check the facts about the victims' ages in the first place.

The age demographic for Bridgend is exactly what is expected for suicides globally and indeed in the UK.

This "blip" as you put it wasnt unusual at all until it was exacerbated by the media....a point acknowledged by the town itself and experts on the matter.
Indeed such patterns are so common they are well researched, documented and not unusual.

3.

However, when you start rattling off a list of unresearched "explanations" to support your foregone conclusions, then you deserve to be pulled up. If anything, firing such glib pronouncements from the hip really isn't that far removed from what the press are doing.

Pulled up? Pulled up? By who? Some self appointed executor of Welsh affairs? Or indignant self rightousness? The "whats reasonable" police? get over yourself. There is no "blip", there is no "blackspot". There is just a small economically depressed town with a suicide rate that on the average is no worse than similar locales in the area withh similar economic problems in a country with a low suicide rate globally which has been the focus of a media attention that has, by the locals own admission, exacerbated the problem and contributed to what seems to be a quite well recognised phenomenon regarding spates of suicide.

There is no insidious influence at play (bar the media), no Walescentric peculiarity, no cults, no internet games, no majic influences.

If the media would bugger off the rate would drop back to its normal position on the right of the bell curve where some town must be. In this case it just happens to be Bridgend.

So you can take your opinions as to your being some sort of benchmark of reasonable opinion and shove em where the sun dont shine because quite frankly.....they wear a bit thin.

There is no blackspot, no inexplicable phenomenon. No matter how much you want one.

If the media pissed off and people like you stopped picking at this problem then Bridgeend would vanish back into the tail end of suicide statistics as represented by the Letterkennys, the County Mayos, the small towns in Finland, the small villages at the butt end of Siberian rivers. Unpleasant places no doubt but not subject to anything more mystical than depressed economies and unfortunate demographics and occupying places in the statistical scheme of things that some place has to occupy.

But......if the entire population of Bridgend kills itself over the next five years....I will be happy to return and admit that there is some "suicide blackspot" in existence replete with all sorts of mystical forces at aplay.

p

[Sam Flynn]

Hmmmmmm

How dare I? How dare I what?

How dare you accuse me of being selective to suit my (non-existent) "point of view" on this matter.

I largely agree with what you say about the press, but that ad hominem barb was uncalled-for.