A group in Belfast is determined to break the taboo surrounding suicide among young men. Bryan Collreports
Y OU CAN'T fail to notice number 209 on Belfast's Falls Road. It's not simply the bright pink facade that makes the premises stand out from the surrounding shops. Few main streets in Ireland have a "Suicide Awareness Support Group" nestled among the usual convenience stores, Chinese takeaways and pubs.
The bold hues, explains Mary Creaney, project co-ordinator of the west Belfast Suicide Awareness Support Group (SASG), are designed to match a pink-and-blue ribbon designed by the group, which they hope will become the international symbol for suicide awareness. But as well as strengthening the group's brand identity, the fresh coats of pink paint symbolise the bold emergence of this once taboo subject in public life.
Suicide rates among young men in Northern Ireland have risen by about a third since the end of the Troubles, with 242 suicide deaths recorded last year. According to the Northern Ireland Statistics Office, north Belfast has the highest rate of male suicide in the North.
Like the community her centre serves, Creaney is at a loss to explain why, at a time of supposed optimism and opportunity, so many young men are taking their own lives.
"There are post-conflict theories that say after any war, suicide rates increase," she says. "What we're seeing in north and west Belfast is no different from global trends in that respect."
Founded eight years ago, SASG began as a support centre for families who had lost loved ones in what Creaney describes as a "cluster" of suicides in the locality. Today, it continues to offer group counselling alongside a suicide prevention programme. The centre provides an emergency advice service, in the form of two mobile telephones, which staff members and volunteers take home each evening. In recent weeks, as many as 22 calls were made to the service in a single day.
Creaney says the extensive use of SASG's services lays bare the long-standing deficiencies in mental health treatment in Northern Ireland. "It can be very difficult to access services here", she explains, adding that many young people in the North, particularly those suffering from eating or personality disorders, are forced to go to the Republic or Britain for treatment, due to a lack of facilities at home.
Progress, however, is gradually being made. A new mental health unit for adolescents is being built at Foster Green in Belfast and is set to open next year.
The new facility will increase the current low number of beds available for young psychological patients.
At present, there are only eight designated beds for 14-17-year-olds suffering from mental health problems in the North. For Julie-Anne Doyle, however, these new developments come too late. Doyle lost her young son to suicide in 2002.
"When [young people] go to hospital, they're not taken seriously," she says. "Some parents were told it was just attention-seeking behaviour and then a few days later, their child was dead." Doyle leads a support session for bereaved families at SASG and says she is still coming to terms with her son's death. "The support group is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes," she says. "There's no time limit on grief with suicide. But if I'm having a bad day, I know that I have those telephone numbers."
Doyle believes the religious beliefs of many in the Falls Road community are one of the greatest obstacles in overcoming the stigma attached to suicide. Although decriminalised in Northern Ireland in 1963, suicide remains, she says, a sinful act in the eyes of many local Catholics.
"I've been at quite a few funerals and the priests have been pretty insulting," she says. "They had the opportunity to send a positive message to a church full of young men, but the old attitudes still came out."
As well as unshifting religious beliefs, suicide has also failed to brush off a long-standing sectarian stigma. "At one time in Belfast, it was seen as a very Catholic problem," says Creaney.
"After 1998, we had 18 deaths in [mostly Protestant] east Belfast, but it was only the deaths in west Belfast that the media chose to sensationalise".