ONE YEAR, ONE COUNTY, 17 SUICIDES ...
Torcuil Crichton reports on the �Bridgend phenomenon�

Scientists call it Active Network Theory - the investigation into the universal laws and calculations of networks and their outcomes. There is a branch of the discipline that looks into how people interact with each other and the Welsh town of Bridgend has undoubtedly become a model worth studying.

"The way the public, the television, press and official facilities have all interacted has created a phenomenon that has gone beyond suicide," says Phil Jones, a research fellow at Swansea University. "The phenomenon is now Bridgend and that is beginning to affect everyone involved."

Whatever is happening in Bridgend and the wider county of Mid Glamorgan has taken scientists, the police, the internet and the press by storm.

Last Tuesday, teenager Jenna Parry became the 17th young person in the area to take her own life since January 2007.

Jenna's death came just days after two cousins died, apparently having taken their own lives. Kelly Stephenson, who was 20, was found dead in a bathroom during a family holiday just hours after learning her 15-year-old cousin, Nathaniel Pritchard, had killed himself. The two lived a few doors away from each other in Bridgend. Their deaths became suicides 15 and 16 on the peppered map of the county.

Jenna's suicide was completely unexpected by friends; "perfectly fine" is how those she spoke with a few hours beforehand have described her. In Bridgend, people are baffled and bewildered by the litany of death that stretches back to January last year, when 18-year-old Dale Crole was found dead. Since then, each young person's death in the area, by the same method used by Crole, has helped cement Bridgend's reputation as a suicide town.

"She had everything to live for," Lisa Jones, the mother of Jenna's best friend, told swarming reporters. "This is just awful. I can't understand what is going on here."

Despite the spate of apparent suicides and the openness in communication about the deaths on online social networking sites, South Wales Police insist there is no evidence of suicide pacts or an internet cult in the area. There is, they say, only one link in the chain of deaths - the press coverage.

All of the youngsters who have killed themselves over the past 13 months used social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace, but then they might have been considered unusual if they hadn't. There has been fevered speculation that the online commemoration of many of the dead had, at the very least, given their deaths an aura of heroism and inverse celebrity that has somehow legitimised suicide as a means of solving these young people's problems.

"We have not found any suggestion of a link or influence through these sites," a police spokesman said. "What we have found is that these are vulnerable young people and that the option of taking one's life is becoming an acceptable one for the issues they are facing."

In a blistering attack on the media, assistant chief constable Dave Morris criticised the way the deaths had been handled by the press. "I have noticed an increase in sensationalist reporting, and the fact that Bridgend is becoming stigmatised. The link between the deaths isn't the internet. It is the way the media is reporting the news."

Sharon Pritchard, whose 15-year-old son was one of the two cousins found dead last week, was just as unequivocal: "The media coverage put the idea of suicide in Nathaniel's head," she said.

Bridgend has a population of 39,000, and includes the town of Pencoed (12,000), which is effectively a suburb. Of the seven youths whose deaths were originally linked, only one lived in Pencoed. The other six lived in communities in Bridgend county borough, which has a population of 132,000 and takes in some former mining communities. It is not by statistical definition, a "suicide cluster".

The ethics of reporting suicide varies from one media outlet to another but this week, all editors have undoubtedly been refreshing on the guidelines, which would unanimously insist there should be no sensationalism, no detailed reporting of suicide methods, and an emphasis on the understanding of the complexity of causes of suicidal behaviour.

Consensus among academics and the experts is that it is better to talk about suicide than bestow it with an air of mystery or taboo by ignoring it. But both groups are at pains to avoid describing what is happening at Bridgend as a suicide cluster.

"It is becoming distracting and frustrating for the police, who find themselves pulling resources in from other places for something that might be a normal hesitation," says Phil Jones, a research fellow at the Institute of Life Sciences at the University of Swansea, who has studied historical suicide rates in Wales. "Yes, the public need to be aware, but that is not going to happen with so much destructive behaviour going on."

Through the echo chamber of the press and the internet, the anger of police and the bereaved families has been amplified while the individual pain that caused the deaths, and its aftermath, is lost.

"We need to analyse this before we can say it is something special," says Jones. "It's worrying obviously - every suicide is a disaster and for each suicide you get six people on average affected afterwards. So for every one, multiply by six the number of people who keep on suffering."

Two people in Scotland will attempt suicide each day, but statistically speaking, suicide is a relatively rare event, measured in single or low double-digit units per 100,000 each year. The figures are so small that increases in the numbers actually have big effects on percentage rates and proportional changes.

Suicide rates across the UK are generally falling, but the latest statistics (up to 2006), show that the Bridgend rates were higher than the national average. In 2006, three young men took their lives in the town, and since then the number has risen to nine.

"The truth is that we are talking about relatively small numbers but each one is an absolute disaster because it's the last thing we want - the last thing people around the person committing the suicides wants," says Jones. "The statistics can make it look low but because it's so personal and emotive, you can get a massive reaction around suicides."

When one follows another in quick succession, the temptation to link the deaths, inadvertently or in banner headlines, can prove too much. From this, a suicide cluster may be born.

There is no consensus on what a suicide cluster is or what it means if there is a cluster. Suicide itself is as old as recorded history and cases of the media being blamed for a spate of copycat deaths go as far back as the publication of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" - an 18th century story of a young artist who shot himself after an ill-fated love affair. Werther fever, as it became known, was believed to have inspired scores of young men to end their lives in the style of the book's sensitive hero.

NUMEROUS studies attest to the power of the media to multiply suicide rates. A study published in Vienna last year showed that when media guidelines were implemented in Austria, there was a reduction in suicide. Dr Jose Bertolloti, who in 2002 carried out a study into the phenomenon for the World Health Organisation, documented several examples of copycat by newspaper.

"When the media takes the role of splashing suicide, this may hit some people who are already on the verge of committing suicide," says Bertolloti. "Reading these things on the front page with important pictures and highlights hits fragile people with mental disorders. When they see the possibility of an exit they might take that decision, and reading about a heroic aura around suicide (like the tributes on "tombstone" websites) may help the person take the decision."

Bertolloti is not intimate with the Bridgend phenomenon but he has no doubt of the possibility to see clusters of suicides across the globe. "You have these contagious suicides happening all over the world all the time until the media moderate the tone."

The most common method of suicide is to jump from high places. There is a documented case where the media in Hong Kong put an arrow on a window that had been used in suicide attempts. Apparently it caused more people to use the same window to repeat the feat. When an episode of Casualty, aired on BBC1 several years ago, featuring an overdose using easily available drugs, it precipitated a 17% rise in cases of self-poisoning the following week.

In 1988, German researchers studied the impact of a TV drama series that showed the suicide of a 19-year-old man. In the 70 days following the broadcast, they observed 62 suicides of men aged 15 to 29 - an increase of 86% on previous years.

"One of the problems with media coverage," says Bertolloti, "is that it soaks into the psyche and people see suicide as a legitimate option for solving problems. If things are presented another way, they are not a legitimate solution."

The one ray of light for Bridgend - and Wales, which statistically has the highest number of suicides in Britain (19.4 per every 100,000 men and 17.4 for the same number of women) - comes from Scotland.

Plagued by an unusually high rate of suicide among young men, the Scottish Executive took action in 1999 to deal with the issue. A national suicide strategy has been in place since 2002 and now seems to be bearing fruit. Choose Life is Scotland's 10-year strategy and action plan aimed at reducing suicides in Scotland. It receives £4 million in funding per year to stretch across Scotland's 32 local authority areas "Before the suicide strategy was put in place, you were twice as likely to end your life in Scotland than you were if you lived in England, and if you were in the Highlands of Scotland, four times as likely," says Dr Rory O'Connor, who heads the Suicidal Behaviour Research Group at Stirling University.

"It's too soon to say, but we hope that in 2013 we will have a 20% reduction in suicide. The data that we do have in front of us, in rolling averages from 2000 to 2003 compared to 2004 to 2006, shows there has been a 13% reduction in suicide pre and post the suicide prevention strategy."

Suicide rates for men and women in Wales were higher between 2004 and 2006 than Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. This is why the Welsh Assembly is now rushing out its own suicide strategy, which is based on the Scottish model. Scottish public health minister Shona Robison has offered the Welsh Assembly any help it needs to institute a new policy.

Bridgend already had the highest suicide rate for men of that age of any area in Wales. Between 1996 and 2006, the suicide rate was more than double the average for the principality, with 44 deaths per 100,000 of population.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show an average of 15 men and women have killed themselves in Bridgend every year since 2001.

"The sad fact is 16 suicides among young people in Bridgend in 12 months is no worse than usual. There were 13 suicides by young people in 2007, and 21 in total. In 2006, the total was 28," says Philip Irwin, a press spokesman for the Bridgend Samaritans.

"One suicide a month in a good year, one every three weeks in a poor one. The profile has been the same for years: young men from poor areas, often with dismal prospects, are most at risk. That might be the reality, but speculation is more exciting. Had he just been dumped? Was he worried about exams? Was he being bullied?"

Irwin notes the Bridgend story only really hit headlines when the 13th suicide, that of Natasha Randall, was linked to one of the dead boys.

"She was a pretty girl who, as every report said, had her whole life ahead of her'. Until then, it wasn't much of a story."

The truth, says Phil Jones, is every suicide is an individual and personal tragedy. "Until we get evidence to the contrary that is what they remain."