A 14th young person in Wales takes her own life and the whole of adult Britain is on suicide watch. Why do our young people want to extinguish themselves? The parents, psychologists, MPs, police and teachers have all had their say. But what do the young people themselves really think?

On Monday Angie Fuller, 18, became the latest teenager to have killed herself in the Bridgend area. She was found by her boyfriend hanged at their home. Yesterday, Philip Walter, Coroner for Bridgend and the Glamorgan valleys, said emphatically that he had profound doubts about any “copy-cat” theory: “I’m of the mind that there is no commonality between these deaths, and preliminary investigations say the same.”

Mr Walter’s expertise notwithstanding, public opinion has its own spin. Increasingly specialist vocabulary is being thrown about to explain the deaths, which include those of Natasha Randall, 17, hanged at her home in Blaengarw, Bridgend; Randall’s friend, Liam Clarke, 20, found dead in the Cefn Glas area of Bridgend; Dale Crole, 18, who was found hanged in Porthcawl in January last year; and David Dilling, 19, and Thomas Davies, 20, who both died the following month. In August, Zachary Barnes, 17, of Wildmill, Bridgend, was also found hanged.

There is talk of suicide cults and chains and contagion; crisis intervention and clusters. Bridgend is the “teenage suicide capital of Britain” – “death cult town” for short, whose “victims” were “groomed” to kill themselves by sinister figures who roam the internet in search, it has been claimed, of the emotionally vulnerable.

The “Bebo internet death cult” has gained increasing currency, despite counter-arguments from people such as Darren Matthews, who runs the local Samaritans group and who points out: “You could probably link loads of youngsters through the internet.”

Could the internet have killed the young people of Bridgend? Is suicide “catching”? The young people who I talked to doubted it: “Tom”, who botched two attempts to kill himself in his teens, and “Philip”, who tried and failed to hang himself when he was 22.

Tom’s first suicide attempt took place when he was 14. He had planned his suicide for two weeks. “It was the best two weeks of my life,” he said. “It was the closest I’ve had to a spiritual experience. All the issues, all the crap were meaningless because I was going to be dead in two weeks.”

Tom cut his wrists and stepped into a warm bath but failed to carry his attempt through. Minutes later he was stemming the blood with a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He made a second attempt, this time with a cocktail of drink and antianxiety drugs, but again he failed. “I remember thinking every morning, if I had a gun I’d blow my head off. My girlfriend had been expelled and I had nobody to talk to. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to be dead. It’s like a physical pain inside.”

Did he, as some psychologists might suspect, fantasise about his own funeral? “It has absolutely nothing to do with that. It is a feeling of profound emotional pain, which you want to drown out. I literally couldn’t see beyond making that pain end.

“The thing with depression is that it’s completely prosaic. It’s about being alone or not having people to engage with. I had terrible acne and thought I’d never have sex. It was that simple. I’m sure a psychologist would have interpreted it as a cry for help but it’s not what it felt like. I was a square peg in a round hole, at a school I hated and felt I could never fit into. My parents were never around. I needed something to change because I felt different from everybody else.”

Philip tried to kill himself three years ago, at the age of 22. “It was getting to the point that I would have to pull over in the car when I was driving in an effort not to deliberately run myself off the road,” he said.

He believes that his depression was set off not by what he had read in the papers or watched on television or downloaded on the internet, but with the revelation by his father that he’d had an affair. “Suddenly he wasn’t a role model or hero for me any more. I started becoming incapable of trusting either of my parents even though they were still together.”

Suicide rates since 1971 have soared in most countries in the world. It is Philip’s view that “the biggest thing for guys is that they have lost their gender roles and things for men have changed so much. I remember thinking, ‘what have I got to offer the world as a man? What is my role?’ I felt I had to be strong and silent but at the same time I felt I couldn’t do ‘masculine things’ like be boisterous.

“It feels like nobody has identified the real causes why young people and teenagers are having difficulties. The ‘romanticising death’ angle is a nice line but nobody who is connected with other people goes onto the internet and thinks, ‘I know, I think I’ll kill myself’. You’re not going to do it to get on to television.

“Looking at the reports into these deaths. I was struck by the lack of insight into the real reasons why any person might feel depressed. That families are very much separate. That there are parents who just switch on the television instead of being involved in their children’s lives. They are too interested in mundane stuff like celebrities.

“It sounds so simple, but what I lacked in my life was a person who would engage with me at a profound level, who would allow me to be exactly as I was.”

For young people needing help with depression: www.thecalmzone.net/

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