A very great deal has been said and written about the suspected suicides by hanging of 17 young people in Bridgend, leaving us with just one unpalatable but necessary question: should we have said and written even more? At the inquests of five of them last week, the coroner carefully trod the well-worn path in search of motive: depression, for instance, or grief or heartbreak. Much the same quest has troubled the media, up to and including far-flung theories, with no evidence whatsoever, of internet provocation and website pacts.

When the gaze moves from the motive to the manner of death, however, the consensus has been to draw a veil. Newspaper reporters, some of them unusually sensitive to accusations of insensitivity, have stuck to the hows and wheres - “found hanging”, “from a tree”, “in an empty house” - while the commentators have similarly tiptoed. One of them, quite properly engaged in compassionate speculation about cause, tried to imagine the despair it took “to fashion the knot, to slip the fixings before the final swing into oblivion”.

Her delicate turn of phrase intended no harm. But one might wonder whether the cumulative effect of such widespread delicacy could inadvertently contrive to give the impression that hanging is an easier, kinder, gentler death than it really is.

Certainly, the significant rise in young women hanging themselves could support this view. Research published last month, by the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol, showed that the proportion of women aged 15 to 34 committing suicide by hanging has increased from 5.7 per cent of all suicides in 1968 to 47.3 per cent by 2005. This is especially puzzling because women, as a rule of thumb, have traditionally tended to eschew a predictably violent or painful death; we are often reminded that the switch from fatally toxic to North Sea gas greatly reduced the numbers of women found dead by their ovens.

Kitchens, by and large, contain a variety of means of suicide, from the perilously sharp to the agonisingly poisonous and the most desperate of women did make use of them when the gas ceased to be lethal. But very many others chose to live instead. By the same token, the cut in toxins in vehicle exhaust fumes, in 1993, and the simple reduction of the number of paracetemol tablets allowed to be sold in a single packet, have driven the resolute to jump under trains - but persuaded the less committed to give life another chance.

Thus we have, in England and Wales, a decline in suicide among young men to the lowest level since the 1970s, and a decline among young women to the lowest level since 1968 - yet at the same time we have what the Bristol researchers call “a massive increase” in the percentage killing themselves by hanging. In which case, it is reasonable at least to ask how many are buying into the decorous notion of hanging as a “swing into oblivion” when in fact it is anything but.

Perhaps there is a distant thought that because it was once the preferred British method of execution there must be something vaguely humane about it. Perhaps those ghastly images of Saddam Hussein's death - here one second, gone literally the next - left some kind of favourable impression. In which case the impressionable young might be better off reading accounts of pre-high-tech public hangings, where the victims “danced” at the end of a rope and it was a final gesture of love for relatives to tug at the twitching feet to shorten the death throes.

Amateur hanging is a dreadful death. An American paramedic friend, with 30 years' experience of collecting the remains of suicides, dreads the hangings most of all. Almost everybody, he says, gets it wrong; some decapitate themselves in the process (“those are the lucky ones,” he adds darkly), some show signs of a protractedly long period of consciousness and some - the ones that haunt - clearly changed their minds too late, as testified by the desperate gouges around the neck.

Even pro-suicide “experts” agree. One of the reasons to feel confident that the internet was not to blame for the Bridgend deaths is that there is too much information available there that actually offers discouragement to hanging. It takes only minutes to find suicide user-guides online - unbearably matter-of-fact, alphabetically ordered lists of means of death, together with the pros and cons of each. Hanging gets a pretty convincing thumbs down. It is, apparently, unreliable and hideously painful: “You might not lose consciousness for five or even ten minutes,” one instructs. “And that will feel like an eternity.”

I understand that the descriptions above are distressing to contemplate; they weren't a barrel of laughs in the writing, either. And they must be even more distressing to any who have lost a friend or family member to a hanging, although presumably those who have sat through a pathologist's report at an inquest will have better than an inkling of the detail.

But the longer we keep the veil drawn, as long as suicides “swing into oblivion”, later to be found “in an empty house”, we are relinquishing the chance to put hanging right up there with the relatively infrequent methods of suicide - jumping from great heights, for example - whose unpopularity boils down to their being just too frightening for all but the seriously determined.

Whether it be hellfire and brimstone preachers, teachers with axes to grind or newspapers on a prurient roll, I do not generally relish modes of communication specifically designed to scare people to death. It is, however, a different matter altogether to scare them back to life.

Carol Sarler is a commentator and broadcaster

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