Words can inspire suicide

As every parent knows, youth is impressionable. At the end of the 18th century, there was a spate of suicides among aristocratic young men in imitation of the hero of Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, who killed himself for love.

The clustering of young suicides, such as has occurred in the last year in Bridgend, has been called the Werther effect ever since.

Clusters of relatively rare events such as suicides and multiple assaults are well-known, but it is always difficult to prove the connection between one such event and others that follow.

For example, I examined three people who, within a very short time of one another, had attacked crowds with a machete. Such attacks are of very rare occurrence, thank goodness, and it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the second and third attacks were in some way inspired by the first: but

if so, the people who committed them were not aware of it, or at least did not admit it. The connection therefore remained purely conjectural.

It is also well known that absorbing or preoccupying events such as wars, including civil wars, lower the suicide rate. Working in a ward which received people who had attempted suicide, or who had at least made suicidal gestures, I noticed that, for the first week of important events such as the Gulf War, or even during prolonged sporting contests, the number of patients declined very markedly. Later, when the events either ceased or receded into the background, the number of patients rose again.

Sometimes, it is not even easy to decide whether there has been any clustering at all. Indeed, it would be statistically surprising if clusters of rare events never occurred purely by chance: the absence, not the presence, of clusters would require an explanation.

The fact remains, however, that youth is impressionable, not necessarily by what is best.