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Bridgend churches face dilemma over suicides

by
20 February 2008

by Pat Ashworth

Flowers for a teenager: the day after her death, aged 18, on 4 February, flowers were left outside the home of Angeline Fuller. She had been found hanging at a house in Nantymoel, Bridgend PA

Flowers for a teenager: the day after her death, aged 18, on 4 February, flowers were left outside the home of Angeline Fuller. She had been found han...

PRESS COVERAGE of the spate of apparent suicides among young people in Bridgend county borough has caused annoyance and impatience among local people, the Area Dean of Bridgend, the Revd Michael Komor, said on Tuesday.

“It gave the impression that you’d only got to live in the area and you’d feel suicidal, too. All right, it’s not Chichester, but it’s a place where I’m happy to bring up my family,” he said.

His comments echoed those made in the House of Commons last week by the MP for Bridgend, Madeleine Moon. She strongly objected to the town’s portrayal as a ghost town “where suicide is just what people do there, because there is nothing else to do”.

Bridgend county borough is named after the county town, and is an area with a population of 130,000. The 17 young people between the ages of 15 and 27 who had apparently taken their own lives over a 12-month period were scattered across the county borough and did not come from the tight, geographical clustering that had been portrayed, Mr Komor said. Until investigations and inquests determined otherwise, the police had found no common link between the deaths, of which the most recent happened on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, he said: “One suicide is one suicide too many. I have personally been involved in the funeral of one of these young people, and it just brings it home again what devastation it causes to those who are left behind.”

Churches in the county borough are already working ecumenically with a number of youth-based projects, particularly street pastors, described by Mr Komor as “at the sharp end, particularly of the clubbing scene.

“The town certainly does act as a magnet for outlying communities and is where the action will be on a Friday and Saturday night. The pastors are well placed to engage with the young people, who may be thinking about all sorts of questions relating to what has happened.”

Both the police and local authority had been supportive of the street-pastors initiative, through which they had got to know the churches better and to respect where they were coming from on these sorts of issues, he suggested. A church representative has been invited on to the multi-agency suicide-prevention strategy group

Mr Komor acknowledged the dilemma for the clergy about how to help. “If we make more of this than we ought to, then we are giving to it the oxygen of publicity. There have been concerns expressed by psychologists that the more we talk about it, the more the idea may be planted in the minds of young people,” he said. “But obviously a lot of people have been touched by this. You look at the size of the funerals of some of these young people and have to ask, what can we do to provide some kind of pastoral outreach in this way?”

The deanery is to set aside a day in the next two or three weeks when churches will be advertised as open, offering quiet space and people on hand for those who might simply want to talk in an atmosphere that is “safe to think the thoughts and ask the questions”, Mr Komor said.

Clergy were also struggling with the fact that in quite a number of the cases, there were no apparent warning signs from the young people concerned about what they intended. “Anything you might want to do pro-actively to prevent it is made difficult, because you don’t know who you’re aiming at. I guess what we’re doing is a little more reactive than pro-active.”

He took reassurance from the fact that schools were on red alert with their own pastoral systems, and were watching out for students who might be at risk.

He concluded: “Statistically, historically, and normally, while suicide is the biggest killer of young men, it is a bigger taker of life in the over-75 bracket. We’re all thinking this is a young person’s problem, but it’s right across the age groups. We shouldn’t necessarily be thinking just about what we can do for young people: it’s what we can do for everyone.”

Mrs Moon described Bridgend as having “good schools, low unemployment, active churches, an active voluntary sector, and social cohesion”, while acknowledging that it did have some marginalised young people. She is campaigning for a national suicide-prevention strategy for Wales, which has a significantly higher suicide rate than England, where such a strategy was introduced in 2002.

On Tuesday, the Welsh Assembly Health Minister, Edwina Hart, told Assembly Members that work on a suicide-action plan for Wales has been accelerated. She recommended school-based counselling services, which will receive £6.5 million over three years. Additional funding is also being made available for health and education schemes and resources. A separate suicide-prevention strategy has also been launched in Bridgend.

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