Feature - Bridgend suicides: the real picture

To the media, Bridgend has become a kind of Welsh Twin Peaks, where young people devoid of hope come together online to plot taking their own lives. The Daily Telegraph described it as a "ghost town in more ways than one" before quoting a young person as saying: "When the first one happened I was shocked but now it just seems normal, fashionable almost. I don't know. It's that time of the year, isn't it?"

It is this kind of report that has enraged local people and Bridgend's youth council is planning to take action against the Telegraph. "We've all been hurt by the coverage," says Les Jones, children and young people's partnership co-ordinator at Bridgend County Borough Council. "It's made Bridgend sound like a place with no hope for young people." When asked what has caused the wave of suicides, Jones replies sadly: "We honestly don't know." The lack of easy answers has led the media to trumpet wild and colourful theories - suicide pacts, a youth work desert, mass deprivation and links to social networking website Bebo - that do not accord with reality, he says.

Since January 2007, 17 people between the ages of 15 and 27 have committed suicide in Bridgend county. It comes at a time when suicide rates for young people in the UK are at a 30-year low. Most of the victims were men but as the death toll rose four women have taken their own lives. The method used in almost all the suicides was hanging, which is extremely unusual for females. The media has speculated that at least 10 of the young people knew each other but the police have ruled out a direct link between the deaths.

And what of the area? Bridgend is both a town and a county, and some of the media have mistaken the borough of 130,000 people for a town of 42,000. The last indices of deprivation for Wales published in 2005 showed that 12 per cent of Bridgend county's wards were in the most deprived 10 per cent of wards in Wales, which is significantly lower than Merthyr Tydfil (36 per cent), Blaenau Gwent (26 per cent) and Rhondda Cynon (19 per cent). However, it may be significant that Bridgend has a 15 per cent higher health deprivation level than the Welsh average.

In spring 2007, long before the media coverage, Bridgend's local health board was worried enough to begin drawing up a suicide-prevention strategy. But why has the plan taken so long to be implemented? Jones says that it was held up when an opportunity to apply for Lottery funding came up. As a result, people who were working on the strategy had to put it on hold and work on a funding application to support the strategy. The Welsh Assembly Government has recently announced that it is to draw up its own strategy, hoping that the plan will have the same success as that launched in 2002 in Scotland, which has been followed by a 13 per cent fall in suicides.

So how are young people in Bridgend coping? In the schools there is a polarisation, says Trevis Woodward, head teacher at Ynysawdre Comprehensive. "Some of the children feel it's nothing to do with them, 'what's all the fuss about?' Then there are those who are upset because they don't understand why friends or members of their extended family are even attempting suicide."

Over the past few weeks, two pupils at the school have attempted suicide. The school employs a full-time counsellor who has been "invaluable", especially with the 20 people who knew the attempted suicides well, he says. But the strain on staff is tough. Woodward says the head of year is taking it particularly hard. "He can't help but think, 'why didn't they tell us?'. At one point, the counsellor needed professional counselling, although she's returned to full professional health now," he says.

Media role

While the police deny any link between the suicides, the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University suggests media reporting of each death can lead to a pronounced increase in such tragedies, especially for those under 25.

Media censorship is neither desirable nor workable, which means that when a suicide cluster begins to form, it can build a contagious momentum of its own. While Bebo has not been directly blamed, youth workers complain that the RIP shrines on the website have amplified the sense of grief and turned it into an adulation for taking one's own life.

"Why Bridgend?" is the obvious question. "It's a tragic series of events but without an underlying cause," replies Carwyn Jones, Labour's Welsh Assembly member for Bridgend. "Each individual had their own reasons and I don't think we know why."

Jeannette Denley, principal youth worker in Bridgend, agrees, citing the case of Jenna Parry, the last young person to take her own life. "She was a regular attendee at one of our youth clubs, although she hadn't been for the past few weeks. It was totally out of the blue, she was a fabulous girl and was nothing like the depressed type of person you might expect."

Denley says there is no shortage of services for young people. She lists a community counselling service at an information shop in Bridgend, a mobile information bus staffed by two youth workers, a counsellor and a nurse, detached youth workers in "nearly every community" and the youth offending team, which runs a restorative justice programme in schools to counter bullying. There is also child and adolescent mental health services, Mind Cymru, the YMCA and educational psychologists. In the wake of the latest suicides, the youth service has been working with friends of those who have committed suicide, and launched a texting service and new website based around the slogan "Just Ask".

Lisa Gilchrist, manager of the Bridgend YMCA, agrees that youth provision is good with one exception - counselling. The majority of counselling services are run by schools yet only two of the suicides were at school, she says. "We need more independent counselling. CAMHS teams have long waiting lists and there is a stigma attached to mental health. And the majority of young people have emotional not mental health problems."

Counselling

Most of the suicide victims are aged between 19 and 25, which is too old for ChildLine and too young for the Samaritans. "I know that Bridgend's youth council asked for an independent counselling service several times. Now the Welsh Assembly are fast-tracking a strategy on suicide prevention. But strategies are really only that if there's no significant funding made available." Gilchrist's argument is supported by the news that workers at Porthcawl Counselling Service, in a small town about seven miles from Bridgend, have written to Welsh Assembly Health Minister Edwina Hart for help because their only income is from fundraising.

Alan Briscoe, project manager for Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (Asist), a pilot project being undertaken by Mind Cymru, insists the real problem is identifying young people in need of help. "We need people in the community and frontline services to be opportunistic and spot a young person's distress." That is what Asist aims to develop, providing training to the police, nurses, youth workers, YOT workers, teachers and others on how to spot people in distress and then refer them to the right place.

For Briscoe, what has happened in Bridgend over the past year is just the tip of the iceberg in Wales. Between 3.4 and five per cent of people in Wales have "serious thoughts of suicide" according to recent research, which amounts to 100,000 to 150,000 people. "Just increasing counselling services won't work unless people refer themselves. The people most in need are those who find it most difficult to ask for help."

WHAT LOCAL PROFESSIONALS THINK

- "Thanks to the press it's almost become copycat. I don't think anyone can ensure there is not another suicide. But we are doing everything in our power to show that there are options for them through information services and counsellors. My objective is to make sure that young people know about these"

Jeannette Denley, principal youth worker, Bridgend

- "When you read the papers you'd swear that Bridgend is a youth work desert but research done by Communities that Care showed young people make more use of youth services here than in other areas. We recognised the suicide rate going up about two years ago, but it was different back then because we were mainly working with young men"

Les Jones, children and young people's partnership co-ordinator, Bridgend County Borough Council

- "The fact is that suicide rates do fluctuate year by year, but what is unusual is the amount of media attention that Bridgend has attracted. There is evidence to suggest that insensitive media attention can exacerbate a cluster situation for people who are already vulnerable"

Alan Briscoe, project manager, Asist, a pilot project being undertaken by Mind Cymru

- "Professionals need to speak out at times like this and say exactly what they think. There needs to be significant investment for counselling in this area. The danger is that it will go to CAMHS. Suicide is often a heat of the moment thing, and that comes when someone feels helpless and hopeless"

Lisa Gilchrist, manager, Bridgend YMCA.