Suicide epidemic in Scotland and Wales

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There has been a suicide epidemic among teens in Bridgend, Wales. The Bridgend authorities say that the county had drawn up a draft suicide prevention strategy and it was "now a question of making sure the strategy was looked at and put into place". This in Wales, while in Scotland the suicide rate has become an "urgent" public health issue, according to the country's health minister, who has pledged £12m of government cash in an attempt to reduce the number of people taking their own lives. "The money is to be spent over the next three years on a program which aims to bring about a 20% reduction in the suicide rate by 2013". Same should be done in Wales.
Whatever is made to help people, young especially, who harbor ideas of suicide is good and laudable. But this idea of establishing a “target” of a 20 % reduction in 5 years, like increasing production of fertilizers or rubber, seems rather ludicrous. In this field the problem should be that of making life worthwhile and meaningful not of enhancing statistical targets.

Can the way that things are being run in a given town be so bad that the teenagers who live there would rather die than live under such rules? Why would we presume that they were wrong about this?

it depends on who's going to take their life. Some suicides have been caught, counseled, released, and still managed to take 'the long vacation' (Kurt Cobain comes to mind).

But this sort of thing is like predicting recessions; the definition only becomes clear once you're in it. It would be nice to help all those who can't face life, but it's a lot harder to identify them.

People need something better to look forward to than the abject misery that they sense in so many of their parents.

I don't think it helps much that older people demonise and despise the young for being who they are. If younger people feel like they're not wanted in society...

It definitely does not. When they taught people to demonize this way, that planted the seed of the destruction of advanced culture. Every "something wrong" becomes more important to a caretaker than the entire rest of the life of that child. That just sets off a chain reaction of "something wrong" events because beating up the child for one wrong thing causes other things to go wrong.