Teenagers need to be taught the facts of death
Ask any disgruntled teenager (aren't they all?) what is wrong with them and the odds are you will get the cliché answers: "I'm bored." "I'm fed up." "Nobody understands..." But there are times when the stock answer hides a darker truth – and the vague unhappiness of the cartoon teenager becomes the desperate horror of self-destruction.
The 17 teenage suicides in Bridgend may be a local abnormality, a tragedy for one community and an appalling burden for individual families. But they should affect us all and act as a terrible warning to anyone, anywhere, with adolescents in the family.
Hundreds of thousands of words have been expended in answer to the baffled question that is always asked when young life is needlessly snuffed out: Why? What could possibly explain the deliberate act by adolescents, with their lives before them, to choose death? Each one is a future ended and promise unfulfilled and we all feel cheated. What contributions, what achievements, what families, what happiness might they have brought to others? We'll never know now. In such perplexity, it is easy to play the blame game. The media, the internet and the pressures of modern life have all come in for criticism – and some of it is justified.
Yet the explanation could be more simple and sad. Could it be that the youngsters have fallen victim to a lethal combination of immature emotion, sentimentality and the empty cult of celebrity? When "catching the bus" trips off the tongue as code for self-slaughter, it shows a shallow and juvenile attitude to death. Let us be clear that we are not witnessing a suicide cult or 'club', as more sensational reports have claimed. Bridgend is just the latest locality for a teen suicide cluster.
In one village in Northern Ireland last year, three 15-year-old boys killed themselves within a month and the health minister met internet companies in a bid to stop websites being used to promote suicide among young people.
Across the United States and on the other side of the globe in New Zealand there have been similar epidemics and suicide prevention programmes have been set up. Nor are these clusters new; in at least one town in Scotland in the 1930s, there was a young male suicide every week. It was ignored and no investigation made but it was assumed these men in their late teens and early twenties were in despair at unemployment and poverty.
What is different about the Bridgend cluster is the size and that it alerts us to the speed with which a suicide epidemic can spread among the young. It should make us all more aware of the need to watch our young more closely for the symptoms of alienation. In most cases, these are just a stage in the messy and chaotic business of growing up but Bridgend has shown how they can become fatal.
The widespread adolescent feeling of isolation was confirmed by a recent Unicef report which ranked Britain last among developed countries for the happiness of children. Teenagers are telling us there is something missing in their lives and they, too, are being ignored. They probably do not know what that something is but it is up to us, their elders, to find out. Is it affection, attention, an aim?
When youngsters disappear into their bedrooms and spend hours in front of a computer screen, are they playing horror games? Are they networking and comparing moans with other adolescents? Or are they checking out suicide sites? Do parents know, do they care – until it is too late?
Police and parents, perhaps to ease their own pain, said media coverage might have influenced later victims and the mother of Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, said: "We feel that the media coverage of the recent suicides put the idea into Nathaniel's head. It may have given Nathaniel the impression that attempting suicide was a way of getting attention without realising the tragic consequences."
I could face the same accusation with this column, but events have to be reported as they happen, particularly when there is cause for public concern. Where parts of the popular media can be faulted is in the manner of the reporting. Some over-sentimental treatment helped romanticise the young victims and played to the very cult of posthumous stardom which caused their deaths.
The role of the internet also needs more attention. I know all the arguments about censorship but servers should be able to shut down suicide websites. It is clear that some of the suicides were beguiled by the idea of celebrity (what use is 15 minutes of fame when you are dead?) and the peer prestige evidenced by memorial websites.
Within hours, thousands log on and leave their tributes in message-speak: "Love you loads, your a star & always will be 4eva xx". "R.I.P. Clarky boy!! gonna miss ya! always remember the gd times!" "Sleep Tight Princess". Others – "Hope ur having a laff up there" and "Look after the others" – betray a childish attitude to death, in which the departed frolic together in some Elysian playground. It is like computer games in which characters are annihilated but are revived at the touch of a button.
By all means understand, counsel and cajole young people who despair of life – but also tell them the facts of death. Death is fatal, final and forever. Its legacy is not a happy-ever-after but an unending sense of grief, loss and, in the case of young suicides, senseless waste.
Tom Brown
24 February 2008
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/Tom-Brown--Teenagers-need.3810004.jp