Youth copycat suicides unusual, says psychiatrist

A "frightening number" of adolescents react to a suicide in their peer group by saying: "That was cool. I wish I had the guts to do it", a consultant psychiatrist said yesterday.

Despite this, copycat suicides are not common, Keith Holmes told the Irish Association of Suicidology conference in Sligo. Mr Holmes, who has counselled schoolchildren in the aftermath of a suicide, said that while mood disturbance was common among young people following a suicide, self-harm was less so.

Copycat suicides were known to happen in the Republic, but they were very unusual. Those young people who reacted to suicide by thinking it was "cool" might not feel the same way in six months' time, he told the conference. Parents should be reluctant to judge a youngster who took his own life as this might discourage their children from discussing the issue with them, he advised.

Conference delegates also heard yesterday that bullies were killing or psychologically maiming hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Galway-based clinical psychologist Michael Mullally said it was his experience that employers, trade unions and government agencies had "left the field to the bully". As a result, the most effective way of dealing with this scourge - despite bullying policies - was for victims to find a new job, he said. Research had shown that 80 people were being bullied or part bullied to death in Ireland every year, he said. On any given day 115,000 Irish people were bullied at work and 460,000 people including family members are adversely effected by this bullying.

When one added the numbers being bullied in the education system and in the home, and migrant workers who were bullied by exploitative bosses and racist colleagues, "well over half a million people on this little island of ours are daily feeling the effects of bullying", he claimed.

What was even more repulsive, Mr Mullally said, was the fact that the bully paid no penalty for the damage inflicted.

"The bully goes free," he said. In a paper entitled Bullying Ireland - a darker side of the Celtic Tiger, Mr Mullally said that whether it took the form of blatant threatening behaviour or a more insidious attempt to undermine confidence, bullying could have devastating consequences, both physically and psychologically.