I turn off on the dodgy road to Shwt, which to the non-Welsh ear sounds somewhere between “shoot” and “shit.” A blind curve descends to a narrow stone bridge over a little river rippling through a grove of dwarf oaks. It’s a glorious, sun-flooded spring morning. The oaks are still leafless, but daffodils are out everywhere, the gorse is spattered with yellow blossoms, and the tits and thrushes are singing their hearts out. There’s nothing suicidal about this rolling, pastoral landscape, drenched with the sense of being inhabited for thousands of years, that I can detect. But a few years ago, a local 17-year-old boy left his car running and gassed himself here.
While there has always been a lot of suicide in the lowlands of South Wales, what’s been happening lately in the county borough of Bridgend is something different and very troubling. Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay. This isn’t just a series of unrelated, individual acts. It’s an outbreak—a localized epidemic—of a desire to leave this world that is particularly contagious to teenagers, who are impressionable and impulsive and, apparently in Bridgend, not finding many reasons for wanting to stick around. It represents, if the official statistics are to be believed, a fivefold increase in Bridgend’s young-male suicide rate in three years.
Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can’t find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel’s publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.
Publicity dramatically accelerates the spread of the contagion. In the late 1970s, there were a number of self-immolations in England and Wales, and within a year after the media picked up on them, the toll shot up to 82. Many of them were women in their 30s, even though mature adults have more life under their belts and are less vulnerable than adolescents to mass psychogenic behavior, and females are statistically much less prone to take their own lives. But humans in general are highly suggestible, especially when things aren’t falling into place.
This particular epidemic in Wales has followed the pattern. On January 17 of last year, the first female—and the 15th suicide in the cluster—a pretty 17-year-old named Natasha Randall, was found hanging in her bedroom in Blaengarw, a depressed former coal-mining town a few miles north of here. This was front-page stuff. The tabloids descended on Bridgend, and the story went national, then international, in less than a week. The sudden global attention precipitated—or permitted—four hangings over the next month. Three of them were girls. It is unusual for girls to hang themselves. Girls care more about how they are going to look, a suicide specialist told me. They overdose or cut their wrists. They are more prone to do it as a cry for help than to go through with it. (This is known in psychopathological parlance as parasuicide: deliberate self-harm without real suicidal intent.)
On February 19, 2008, 16-year-old Jenna Parry was found dangling from a tree in a wooded area called the Snake Pit, half a mile from her home in Cefn Cribwr, a village a few miles west of the town of Bridgend. Then there were no deaths for almost two months. Everyone hoped the epidemic had run its course, and that the kids had come to their senses and gotten a grip.
There was speculation that the victims might have belonged to an Internet suicide cult—when there was a hanging, often the person’s friends would put up a memorial page dedicated to him or her on Bebo, a popular social-networking site. In two cases, those who wrote loving eulogies were found hanging a few weeks later. The memorial pages, which brought some of the victims 3,000 “friends”—more than they had had in life—have been taken down.
The first known Internet suicide pact surfaced in Japan in 2000, and a new epidemic has been raging there since last April. About 1,000 Japanese have killed themselves by inhaling fumes created by mixing common household cleaning products. Police have asked Internet service providers to shut down suicide Web sites but have found it harder to keep people from posting the recipe for the mix or raving about how this method enables you to “die easily and beautifully.” Why these young people are so eager to die—what it is that their life in Japan isn’t giving them—is as much of a mystery as what is happening in Bridgend.
In Wales, however, the victims’ friends all say that the Internet has nothing to do with what is happening. “It’s nothing like that,” a girlfriend of Natasha Randall’s told a reporter. The victims acted on their own, she believes. “People get down, and they do it.” The Internet is just how young people communicate and, to a large extent, socialize these days. This certainly isn’t a suicide pact like the one made in 1997 by Heaven’s Gate, the cult in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 of whose members, dressed in matching black shirts and sweat pants and brand-new Nike sneakers, swallowed phenobarbital-laced applesauce with a vodka chaser, then put plastic bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves.
There are many contexts in which the tragic deaths in Bridgend can be seen. The Gilbert Grape syndrome, as it could be called: the boredom, demoralization, and anhedonia of being inextricably stuck in some backwater place. As one Bridgend girl told the Telegraph, “Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do.” Another said, “I really do feel sometimes like I will never get out of here.”
In 2007, a unicef study of child well-being in 21 developed countries ranked Britain dead last. A key measure of a society’s health, the study maintains, is how it takes care of its children. Time magazine’s international edition ran a cover story about how the youth of Britain are “unhappy, unloved and out of control,” drinking more, doing more drugs, becoming sexually active in their early teens (many girls at 15 and younger), and exhibiting more antisocial behavior than ever before, due at least partly to parental neglect. In some cases, disaffection leads to violence: gang-related stabbings are alarmingly on the rise. “The British have a long propensity to recoil in horror from their children,” the story reports, and now they’re really scared of their young. Another study, by some Oxford social scientists, finds that the morale of school-age children throughout the U.K. is appallingly low. With parents failing to socialize their kids into adulthood, British youth, and other kids in the modern world, particularly in its marginalized sectors, are forming their own dysfunctional social groups. Children are less integrated, so they spend more time with their peers. “Add to the mix,” the Time story continues, “a class structure that impedes social mobility and an education system that rewards the advantaged, and some children are bound to be left in the cold.”
One social worker here tells me, “It’s surprising more of them aren’t doing it. These suicides are a symptom of a deeper societal malaise.” But why are they happening here, in this particular part of Wales?
The British tabloids have really done a number on Bridgend with their lurid headlines (two more hangings rock death-cult town; two cousins from ‘suicide town’ hang themselves within hours as death toll rises) and labels (“Britain’s bleakest town”). Official police reports were no kinder, identifying Bridgend as a “binge-drinking hotspot,” with more clubs and pubs per square mile than anywhere in the U.K. except Soho—which is no more true than the general tabloid depiction of it as a dead industrial hub. During World War II, Bridgend had one of the biggest munitions factories in the country, employing 40,000 workers, most of them women. After the war, new generations worked in its steel mills and, more recently, in high-tech Sony and Jaguar plants. Swansea, 20 minutes to the west, was immortalized by its most famous native son, Dylan Thomas, as an “ugly, lovely town,” and in the 1997 film Twin Town as “a pretty shitty city.” But Bridgend is nicer. It’s a perfectly pleasant provincial town. There are a few grim pockets of council housing, but I’ve seen a whole lot worse.
I have lunch at a Bangladeshi restaurant next to a nice couple in their early 30s. They live in Brackla, once the largest private development in Europe, and now a mix of comfortable middle-class, working-class, and subsidized housing—and the site of one of the hangings. The guy works at the Jaguar plant. It’s his day off. He says he knew Gareth Morgan, at 27 the second oldest in the cluster, who hung himself on January 5, 2008. “Not well, but enough to nod to,” he tells me. “We went to Bryntirion school together, but weren’t in the same grade. His nickname was Mugsy. He was definitely not the type.” Mugsy was, in the words of a mystified friend, “the joker in the pack. If there was ever a party, he’d be the one running around naked. He was popular with the ladies and great at football. The night before he died he picked up his kit for his pub’s team.” The friend goes on, “He wasn’t computer literate, so he couldn’t have been in a cult. He had a kid and had just broken up with his girlfriend, which might have had something to do with it.”
Breakups are a big cause of suicide in every culture. As the anthropologist Helen Fisher explains in her book Why We Love, falling in love triggers the chemical reward system in the brain, and when the object of your affection suddenly decamps, it can be like a junkie going cold turkey and drive you to madness.
Loren Coleman, the author of Suicide Clusters, writes provocatively that the Bridgend cluster “is probably merely being pushed along by the copycat effect, in which the model for suicide among impulsive, action-driven, forlorn youth has now been placed in front of them in an area that has turned grim in a downward economy reinforced in the nearly perpetual damp mists that shroud Bridgend in the long winter months. The darkness of despair can run deep. One need not blame cults, pacts, video games, the Internet, or even the media. The gloom is like the fog surrounding one at night in Bridgend, and for many, the modeling of past suicides shout out from those Welsh nights.”
Could the famously depressive Welsh be suffering from full-time sad, or seasonal affective disorder? Could they, after many generations, have internalized the foul weather so that it has actually re-arranged their genetic code and become hereditary? Could this be partly what is happening in Bridgend? Bridgend is no more perpetually socked in than the rest of Wales, but the weather could well be a contributing factor. Perhaps the problem lies more with the societal climate. The impossibly high expectations of modern consumer culture (the mansion and the luxury car these kids don’t have), lack of opportunity, loss of traditional priorities, empty time, and family breakdown are a perfect recipe for the “anomie”—disorienting rootlessness—that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim explicated in his pioneering l897 treatise, Suicide. Even back then, Durkheim noticed that industrialization was tearing people away from their traditional moorings and not putting anything in their place, that people weren’t being integrated into society, and that increased wealth wasn’t providing happiness—a problem that has become much bigger now that we have been reduced to consumer objects and our social interaction has become largely virtual.
Coleman’s spookier contention, that “the modeling of past suicides shout out from those Welsh nights,” gains increasing credibility a few days later, when I drive to the coast of Wales under a glowering, low cloud ceiling the whole way. Occasionally I glimpse the ruins of a high-walled Norman castle on a hilltop. Impaled heads were probably displayed on the ramparts back in the day, I think. A lot of blood has been spilled on this land. A lot of un-laid-to-rest souls could still be roaming around, if you believe in that sort of thing. The Vikings stormed through Bridgend, after the Romans, and before the Normans. The Welsh have been repeatedly conquered. They are a half-assimilated island in an English sea, like the French Canadians of Quebec, who have one of the highest suicide rates in the New World. Centuries of oppression have built centuries of resentment.
Fifteen hundred years ago the Celts were converted to Christianity by syncretism—the itinerant monks who were spreading the Gospel packaged it in terms of the Celts’ existing beliefs. Churches were built on pagan sites. Baptism was presented to the early Celtic converts as a ritual drowning of their pagan spirits. On the eve of All Saints’ Day (Halloween), the Celts dressed up as ghosts and skeletons to protect themselves from the restless spirits of the dead.
Kenneth McAll, a Scottish psychiatrist, maintains in his book Healing the Family Tree that the mentally ill are being tortured by their dead ancestors and that the best therapy is to identify and liberate the malevolent spirit by performing the Eucharist. The idea that these kids killed themselves because they were all mentally ill and being tormented by their ancestors, or possessed by marauding spirits, seems pretty far-fetched, but could these suicides not represent some kind of an atavistic response to the shittiness of the lives they have been presented with? What is this “other side” they tell each other they will soon be meeting up on? According to the British writer A. Alvarez’s The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, which traces the shifting cultural attitudes about suicide through history, the Druids—the magico-religious caste of the Celts, their polytheistic, animistic high priests and nature mystics—actually promoted suicide as a religious practice. They had a maxim, Alvarez relates: “There is another world, and they who kill themselves to accompany their friends thither, will live with them there.”
And this is the old Druidic heartland.
I pull up to the Bettws Boys and Girls Club, one of the places I read about. Some of the members were close friends of Natasha Randall’s and are being watched closely.
Bettws is an old farming village of a few thousand, four miles from the town of Bridgend. You come up the hill above Shwt and the club is on the left, in the old Bettws council schoolhouse. There’s a stone plaque outside from 1913 that reads, dyfal dong a dyrr y garreg, which means “Keep chipping, the stone will break.” Two boys in their mid-teens are smoking cigarettes and oozing attitude outside the door.
I’m not expecting anything here except grimness, but as soon as I open the door of the small building, I immediately get the sense that something special is going on, a powerful blast of what I will only later realize is an affirmation of life. It’s cozy and welcoming. There’s a leather sofa and some armchairs in the hallway; a cute little tuck shop and a carpentry shop built by prisoners from the big penitentiary just outside Bridgend; a music room in which a tall, lanky 19-year-old boy nicknamed Roasty (short for Roast Potatoes; his real name is Gareth Jones) is picking tricky Hendrix licks on an electric guitar; a billiards room where a group of kids are shooting pool; a row of computers that several girls are sitting at; and a room with a little boxing ring. The place is run by Neil Ellis, a 56-year-old former paratrooper. His two adorable little daughters are chasing each other around the premises. Neil’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather were all coal miners. They worked in the collieries up in the dark, narrow, misty valleys above Bettws.
“These kids have lost their tough-mindedness,” Neil tells me. “When we were growing up, you didn’t kill yourself. You dealt with it. One guy who did and left two kids was always referred to as ‘that bastard.’ It was a hard life in the coal towns, but a good one. There were accidents in the mines, and colliers died of dust”—pneumoconiosis, or black lung. But the men were proud to be wage-earners and to provide for their families. All that ended in the early 80s, when Margaret Thatcher shut the mines down because of pollution and the radicalism of the miners’ union, and because the seams were giving out.
After the mines were closed, Neil continues, people lost their houses and went begging on the street, and families fell apart. “That bastard Thatcher militarized the police and destroyed the whole social structure. If she ever showed up in the street here, people would stone her,” Neil says. “She’s as hated as Winston Churchill,” who put down a 1910 coal strike in South Wales when he was home secretary.
The B.B.G.C. is a real club. Its members drop in and stay as long as they like. Many of them practically live here, avoiding awful situations at home. One afternoon a boy tells me, “I just got thrown out by my mother because she thought I hadn’t enrolled in trade school for the fall, but I had. She told me I was a waste of space. I told her to fuck off.”
Former members keep dropping by, like 18-year-old Martin Perham, who is on leave from the army and is about to be sent to “Afghan,” where Neil’s 36-year-old son, Rhydian, will soon be starting his second tour. “Martin was a challenging kid but now he’s a model citizen,” Neil tells me. “Maybe he had some run-ins with the law, but that’s a rite of passage for all these kids.” Jo, one of the other staff members, explains, “Neil took him under his wing, and little by little gave him responsibilities at the club, and respect, and turned him around. He joined the army and is coming around by leaps and bounds.”
Martin’s now got his life planned. He’s going to do 22 years in the service, then come back here and set up his own roofing business.
Neil drives me up to the valleys, where the old coal towns are and where many of the hangings have taken place. It is not hard to see why. The landscape is stark and grim. You could feel trapped here, living in one of the identical terraced houses that were built a hundred years ago for the miners and their families and extend for miles in thin ribbons hacked out of the steep valley slopes, one soul-less box of dingy gray pebble-dashing after another. Now the ones who work have to commute to the steel mills in Port Talbot, just this side of Swansea, or to the factories in Bridgend, but many are on the dole, living on biweekly unemployment checks. Even in Bettws, Neil says, “a lot of people don’t own cars, and it’s cheaper to buy a bottle of cider from the off-license than to take the bus to Bridgend, so they don’t go anywhere. Each community is a little world of its own. If some boys from the next town come looking for trouble, they’re going to find it.” But much of Britain suffers from this sort of oppressive, impersonal sameness. You find similar habitat on the continent, grimmer the further east you go. The suicide rates in Slovenia and Belarus are more than four times higher than those in the U.K. The Russian Federation has 41.25 per 100,000, while the U.K. has only 7.5, according to the most recent World Health Organization figures.
As in many rural parts of Europe, families have been living in the same place for generations, which means that their cumulative coefficient of kinship is similar to what you’d expect between cousins. This suggests that traits like suicidality and depressiveness, and the low levels of serotonin in the brain they are associated with, could be more concentrated in certain regions. A study of the brains of suicide victims who were abused or neglected as children found epigenetic changes—that is, chemical alterations on the “outside” of DNA strands, which can be caused by environmental factors. So the effect of parenting—good, bad, or nonexistent—might have a lifelong impact by determining which genes get expressed and which get “switched off.”
Black streams of slag, known as coal tips, stain the steep opposite wall of the valley as Neil and I make our way up the interminable main drag of Pontycymmer. “Twenty years ago you’d have seen a sea of black faces in the streets here,” he tells me. He points out the site of an old vaudeville hall where, he says, Stan Laurel performed in the 1920s, before he became the lanky sad-sack sidekick of Oliver Hardy.
Where Pontycymmer’s long valley comes to a dead end, we reach the village of Blaengarw, where Natasha Randall last lived, although she was seldom there. “Tasha lived in Bettws for 14 years,” Neil tells me. “Her mother and father were estranged from the time she was four, and she and her sister were brought up by their grandfather, who was the rock of the family. A few months before she took her life, her grandfather died, and she moved to Blaengarw with her father. Her sister got her own flat in Cefn Glas, and she spent a lot of time there and in Wildmill [a rough section of Bridgend], where she fell in with the wrong fucking crowd. So she had problems on problems.”
Our next stop, one valley over, is Nantymoel—barely more than a village, where three of the suicides took place. The second hanging in Nantymoel, five days after Natasha Randall’s funeral, was Angeline Fuller, who was not from there. A sultry, raven-haired 18-year-old English girl who had moved from Shropshire 18 months before, she was found by her fiancé, who said she had everything to live for. The couple had a stormy relationship, but were apparently deeply in love. Angie had tried twice before. She worked in a designer outlet store, was a Goth, and wrote in her Facebook profile, “I don’t like myself, but hey who does?” She had been on her computer an hour before taking her own life.
The road winds up and over a ridge, from which we can see down into Rhondda. “This valley is where the coal that fueled the British Empire came from,” Neil says. “And this is where I grew up and smoked dope and I couldn’t wait to get out.” Our route back to Bettws takes us through Caerau, once one of the biggest of the coal towns and now home to big social problems, and finally through Maesteg, where, Neil says, “a couple of boys done it.”
Back at the club, I find Cassie Green, Natasha’s close friend, at a computer.
Cassie is a big girl with a beautiful face, and remarkably self-possessed for an 18-year-old. “I’m from Bettws,” she begins. “My family was farmers. My father was from Sarn, 10 minutes from here. My mother was from here and her mother and father and grandparents and great-grandparents, and that’s as far back as I know. My dad’s not doing anything, and my mum goes from job to job. At the moment she’s working in a bakery in Newport. I’m an only child. My parents split when I was 13. I live with my mum, and my dad’s in Sarn.
“Tasha and I were the same age. Her mother was from here, and her mother’s father lived down the road. We had a childhood like any childhood, fun and just normal. After elementary school we went to Llanhari, a comprehensive school in Welsh that was an hour away. Tasha was always happy, always smiling, like nothing could get her down. Even if something was getting her down, she wouldn’t show it. After we graduated, when we were 16, I saw less of her, but we still saw each other on weekends. Six months ago she got a boyfriend. By that time I wasn’t seeing her so much. Kids were already hanging themselves. I knew two: Tasha’s friend Liam Clarke”—who hung himself in a park in Bridgend—“and the first kid to do it, Dale Crole. He hanged himself in Porthcawl in January 2007.”
Why did Tasha do it?, I ask.
“I don’t have a clue,” Cassie says. “It was the worst thing in my life. Liam died the month before, and her grandpa a few months before. She was doing drugs, and I heard other kids were bullying her. I know she didn’t get along with many people in Bridgend. Girls were jealous of her beauty, and she took things to heart. She had problems with her skin. She was dark-skinned, though her father and mother are white. I don’t think it had anything to do with the Internet.”
Cassie shows me her Bebo profile. She has written, “I can’t trust no one any more,” “Tasha r.i.p. I love you,” “Tasha my baby god what have you done?” She clicks on a photo of Tasha with a modest glimpse of cleavage that she says prompted the press to make salacious insinuations. “Tasha was stunning,” she says. She tells me how the press misconstrued Tasha’s message on Liam’s memorial page, “me too,” as meaning that she was planning to kill herself, too. Bebo is designed so that “me too” comes up automatically whenever you choose to copy your posting to your own page.
Cassie knew Jenna Parry, who took her life one month after Tasha. “We went to the same training school. Jenna was always happy and bubbly, a lovely person. No one knows why, but she may have done it because of Tasha, and splitting up with her boyfriend just a day or so before. They’d been together a long time. I heard it was a painful breakup. She’d tried [suicide] twice before. Jenna’s death was not as bad as Tasha’s, but I was upset.
“I love this club,” she says. “It’s changed so much since Neil came here four years ago. I didn’t go before. The kids come and they love it here.”
Besides the four other hangings that followed soon after Tasha’s death and the ensuing media feeding frenzy, there were two girls who attempted suicide. They are both from Pontycymmer, down the road from Tasha, whom they knew, so their attempts were possibly related. But in both cases it was probably more a cry for help. One of the girls tried with her cell-phone charger cord and was cut down by her father in the nick of time. She told her story to Closer, a scandal rag.
The following evening, I drive down to Bridgend so I can talk to the other girl from Pontycymmer—let’s call her Terri. Cassie and Legs (real name: Jamie Smith), a 19-year-old trainee youth worker at the club, accompany me. Terri is a small, pretty, outgoing 18-year-old. We wait for her to get off work, and I invite the three, and another friend of Terri’s, to dinner. Some of them want to go to McDonald’s, but after a heated discussion the five of us end up piling into a booth at a nicer chain restaurant near a Holiday Inn. They all order burgers and fries and Cokes. Terri is completely guileless and has no more problem than Cassie talking about what she’s been going through. It’s the boys who have trouble getting out what’s inside of them.
“I grew up with my stepfamily,” Terri begins. “My mother, her boyfriend, and his two children, and they had my brother. It was a stable, happy family situation. We went to school with Cassie and Tasha. Tasha was always, like, polite and friendly, and I was really shocked by what she done because I knew she had hopes for the future. When we were six we talked about what we wanted to be, pop stars and fantasy dream things, and Tasha said, ‘I want to be a solicitor.’ I cannot say why she killed herself. First I thought it had to do with her friend Liam Clarke, but now I think you can get obsessive that there are better things after death.”
Where does this obsession come from?, I ask.
“It’s something that develops in your mind,” she tells me. “You reach a stage in your life where you start to think death is not the bad thing you are taught to think, where you get this feeling. You’re feeling miserable being here and thinking there’s got to be a better place. I don’t believe in heaven, God, or none of that.
“We all went to the Welsh comprehensive school. I was really good friends with Tasha until we were 15. We saw each other every day, rode an hour to school and back. After we graduated, at 16, I didn’t really see her. She went to live with her father, but never slept there, and started going out a lot and moving with the druggie scene in Bridgend. We all used to smoke cannabis in school, but this was hard-core.
“I was already thinking about suicide since I was 13 and I knew others were hanging themselves. When I was 12, my family fell apart and my mother took up with this man and I didn’t get along with him. I’ve had a lot of people betray me and I find it hard to trust people, friends as well. I did try to kill myself when I was 14. I took an overdose of painkillers. I suffer from severe headaches and carried them in my schoolbag, but I got scared of what I done. We were at school and I told the nurse and she got me to the hospital in time.”
Terri’s cheerfulness and effervescence are beginning to evaporate, and a dangerously scared and fragile kid emerges. “Tasha was the seventh,” she continues, referring to the seven suicides that were well publicized at the time. “I never knew that the other six done it. I never read people’s pages. I was not aware of Tasha’s tribute to Liam, so her death came as a complete shock and surprise. Cassie told my friend, and my friend told me. I didn’t believe it for a few days. I didn’t register it, and after a while it hit me that she was actually dead. A while after Tasha did it, things started to become hard for me. I had family problems and friend problems. A girl was trying to come between me and my girlfriend and it got really stressful and I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore, all that stress on top of me, school and people. A lot of people said it’s selfish what these people done. But to me the only selfish people are the ones that drove them to it. It’s been a month since I tried to do it. I can’t really remember much about it, but I was feeling unhappy with life, sitting alone in my room. My mother was in the house. At the time I was mad at her. My head kept telling me to do it because everything was going to be O.K. So finally I tied a couple of belts and jumped off the stairs, but my head slipped through the noose. It only held me for a split second. My mother came. I fell to the floor really shaking and got up sitting and crying. For two weeks I was laid out. I still haven’t recovered, to be honest.”
Legs interjects supportively, “I was suicidal too. I thought I was going to shoot myself in the head with a crossbow.”
Terri goes on: “Tasha made me think I could do it. I felt less scared knowing one of my friends had done it. But I started to think, I don’t know if the future is bright, but that makes me curious to see what will happen, and things started to look up after I came down and got this job. I’ll be doing college next. I hope to get a job as a social worker. Now I have aspirations. I know the ability is in me to try again, but I’d have to be extremely low. I live in a dreamworld, thinking everything is wonderful, but every once in a while I snap back to reality and feel down. My mother sympathizes, but not as much as I need her to. We know someone else who didn’t have a very good family life and has been living alone since she was 15. She had really shit parents, old-fashioned, living in the past where it was acceptable to treat your kids badly, with physical and verbal abuse. People should be educated in the way they would feel if they were mistreated. I do think that having separated parents has a big effect. If people are putting you down it makes you feel like you’re a bad person. Even if it’s people you don’t like. Parents should support their kids in every circumstance, not take out their own frustration. When people do try to kill themselves, they don’t think of the effect on others, how my friends and family are going to feel. I didn’t think of that. I was so angry I didn’t care.”
There is a psychodynamic explanation of suicide, that it’s 180-degree murder. You really want to kill somebody else, usually an abusive parent or other relative, but you eliminate the abuse by killing the self. You kill the abusee instead of the abuser and try to send the strongest fuck-you message you can, usually by hanging yourself where the abuser will be the first one to find you. For the record, there have been no allegations of abuse in any of the Bridgend suicides.
The next night, my last in Wales, Neil and I take Roasty up to Cardiff to hear some live music. Roasty has never been to Cardiff at night, even though it’s only 25 miles from Bettws. As Sam, a support worker at the club who is like Roasty’s big sister, told me, “The kids don’t know all the things they can do. It’s never been explained to them, offered to them.”
Neil has a present for me in a cardboard box: a white banner with the Welsh dragon in the center, wrapped around a plastic statue of the dragon.
Bridgend’s respite from the wave of suicides lasted less than two months after Jenna Parry’s death. On April 6, a 23-year-old girl from Cardiff named Michelle Sheldon hung herself in the Cefn Glas estate, in the town of Bridgend. She had come to visit her boyfriend. Three boys found her and cut her down, but she died after three days on life support.
A few weeks later, Neil e-mails me with more bad news, this time even closer to home. One of the club’s members, 19-year-old Sean Rees, hung himself on the Top Site, a knoll just behind the club where the nicest houses in Bettws are. “He is the first one from Bettws,” Neil tells me. Tightly wound but always composed, he seems to be losing it this time. Sean was described by friends as happy-go-lucky and cheerful; he had just passed his driving test and had a job at a Sainsbury’s grocery store. He was well liked and it seemed he had everything to live for. That Saturday night, he had a row with the friends he was out drinking with and stormed off. “He hung himself from a tree in a small clearing surrounded by trees that is so peaceful-like. The police left a bit of the rope,” Neil says. “The politicians are putting together a rapid-response team, but they don’t have any counselors on the ground, so it’s bullshit, and the government won’t give us any money because we’re a private charity. We’ve had to let one of our staff go.”
He reflects: “These kids don’t have any coping mechanisms. We were raised up where you didn’t kill yourself. This is going to be a hard thing to turn around.” Soon afterward I get another e-mail from him. “The whole club has been involved in some pretty intensive anti-suicide prevention work following the death of Sean. We took a group down to Starmans [a farmhouse on the coast] for the weekend just to let them chill out. Lots of soul-searching and crying went on. The club has not been a fun place to be these last two weeks. I found out that all the young people, including Sean Rees, have a funeral song. I’ll let you know what the words are as soon as I find out.”
On May 4, 23-year-old Christopher Jones, nicknamed Whiskers, who worked at Apex Drilling and was about to become a father, was found hanging in the shed in his yard in Nantymoel. There was no direct connection with Sean’s suicide, but in the case of 26-year-old Neil Owen, who was found hanging from a tree a mile from Bettws on June 6, there was. Neil had once been Sean Rees’s roommate, before moving into a flat above the Oddfellows Arms pub, near the club. There was also a clear link to the June 7 plunge of 22-year-old Adam Thomas, a friend of both, from the balcony of his hotel in the Turkish resort town of Içmeler, where he had gone with his girlfriend to try to get over the loss of his two friends. Thomas was from Llangynwyd, a few miles from Bettws.
On June 16, Carwyn Jones, also a friend of Sean’s and Neil’s—all three grew up on the same street—hung himself in a field near the Oddfellows Arms. He was followed on August 16 by Rhys Davies, who did it in his bedroom down at Bettws Bottom Site, on the road to Brynmenyn. Davies was the last from Bettws, but on November 11, Lisa Dalton, a single mother, hung herself in Bridgend. She was battling anorexia and had medical issues. And before the grim year ended, there was yet another victim, 17-year-old Robert Scott Jones, found hung in a lot near a tennis club in Bridgend town on the morning of December 28. So it might not be over.
Neil Ellis found out what Sean Rees’s funeral song was. It isn’t an original composition but R. Kelly’s “The World’s Greatest”:
To make donations to the Bettws Boys and Girls Club in Bridgend County Borough, e-mail bettwsbgc@btinternet.com.
