What can you say about the Bridgend suicides? It’s a tragedy for the victims and the bereaved both, made worse by a torrent of media hype flooding over the town and the accompanying headlines. Worse is the talk about suicide pacts, copycat suicides and Werther effect, all of which sounds vaguely patronising at best, reducing the suicides and the pain and suffering they caused families and friends to some insidious trend or fashion. Of course the media, in love with itself as always, has also asked itself the hard (but exciting!) question whether they might not be to blame, their mighty influence causing the “epidemic”.
What rot.
Copycat suicides do happen, but they are not undertaken by people who are otherwise fine and just pushed into suicide by the media, or friends, or whatever. They’re a proximate cause, not the ultimate cause of suicides, as the Wikipedia article and the sources it cite also make clear. There’s more going on than just impressionable youths imitating each other. What exactly drove each of these victims to their deaths I don’t known and nobody knows, but I do know what created the pressures that drove them to their deaths.
The truth is, in Britain it’s now increasingly a crime to be a teenager. Day after day if you’re a teen, you are bombarded with the message that you’re scum: knife crime, binge drinking, anti-social behaviour, chavs: a constant litany of ills supposedly caused by teens. Meanwhile more and more repression against teenagers is tolerated by society, from using asbos to combat legal but “problematic” behaviour, to those mosquito anti-teen devices that chase them out of shops to the ever increasing presence of CCTV to keep them under surveillance. Politicians worry constantly about teenagers, the media reports on them, not for their sakes, but for the threat they supposedly are against others. Is it any wonder that many teenagers, derided as chavs from birth feel worthless? All our media stereotypes about teenagers are bad, from Little Britain to Catherine Tate. As if adolescence is such a happy time anyway.
But even if you’re not typecast as a chav or a hoodlum you have problems. Few teens, even those with nice middle class parents get to be Max Gogarty. All their lives they’ve been bombarded with commercials and aspirational messages telling them they should expect a good job, a nice house and car, holidays twice a year, all the trappings of the middle class lifestyles their parents have, only to discover once they finish school or graduate from university that it’s all a crock. Either, like in Bridgend, the jobs aren’t there or, like in London, there are no houses to be had for love nor money or even, as in Plymouth, both jobs are missing and houses are priced out of reach.
It’s this twopronged development that’s driving these suicides, the constant reinforcement that you’re scum, combined with the resentment and despair at seeing others have the good life that is forever out of your reach.