Suicide

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:38 pm on 7 January 2020.

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Photo of Suzy Davies Suzy Davies Conservative 1:38, 7 January 2020

Well, of course, this report is part of a bigger picture of reviews that have been taking place over many years. For those families and friends of the young people who killed themselves in Bridgend in 2007 and 2008 and beyond, obviously, for them, those events don't feel so very long ago. And of course, the use of the internet implicated in that suicide cluster, which is now so embedded in the lives of our young children and young—well, young people generally—for me, it feels almost impossible to try and protect against those evils, when we have so little control over its positive use.

In 2015, the University of Oxford Centre for Suicide Research recommended measures for those local services, to deal with suicide contagion—not a very nice phrase, but I think you know what I mean. It was an England document, but I'm sure Public Health Wales will have seen it as well. Can we attribute the drop in the occurrence of these suicide clusters to local services acting on research of that nature? Because if we can, that gives us greater confidence in local services taking up the recommendations that we've just been talking about today, and seeing that they do actually make a difference.