Death-list rumours take hold in town haunted by suicide mystery

[Stoneage Dinosaur]

The terrorism may be gone from their society but impressionable teenagers in Northern Ireland are facing a frightening new enemy from within their own youth culture.

Self-harm, it seems, has taken over from the guns and bombs, with young people in a suicide-blighted area being intimidated by vicious rumours and threats spread by the internet and text message. The most chilling rumour doing the rounds in Portadown, where three 15-year-old boys committed suicide within three weeks, is about a list of ten young people who are going to hang themselves.

The rumour is accompanied by a brutal threat: that the youngsters on the list will hang themselves or face being hanged by nameless others.

Times online story

[jw]

Thirty years of violence, it seems, has created a society that not only continues to breed intimidation instinctively but falls easy prey to it.

For reasons unknown NI, is currently experiencing a tragic spike in the numbers of suicides, but these text and internet messages through Bebo pages are hardly helping matters.

I also read in The Times last week of other suicides in NI, and that a web site called a.s.h, or this related one, (nfbsk) gives people encouragement and instructions, although others say these sites actually do more good in turning people away from suicide.
Some older comments, and requests.
The newspaper article mentioned a chat site, but I couldn't find one.
Suicide is so tragic and from most peoples POV including mine, incomprehensible. But few of us go through life, without being touched very closely by it.

[snoozn]

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point examined a suicide epidemic. I couldn't get the OP article to open so I'm not sure it would be similar, but here is Gladwell giving a little summary of that chapter:

One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970's and 1980's, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment--from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?

(from http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html)

snoozn