Bridgend: a year on

An excellent article by Carole Cadwalladr in yesterday's Observer about the reporting of the Bridgend suicides. She made all the points I've been banging on about: the confusion of Bridgend the town with Bridgend the county borough; the lurid and inaccurate claims that the suicides were linked to an Internet death cult; the unnecessary details given about the method by which people chose to kill themselves, which almost certainly led to more copycat suicides. More worryingly, she also suggests that the reporting may have had a wider impact beyond Bridgend. Here's the relevant paragraph:

'Perhaps the most disquieting thing about the Bridgend cluster, and the aspect of it that has so far been ignored, is that it is unlikely to have been confined to Bridgend. "People have a greater understanding of what a cluster is now," says Anne Parry of Papyrus. "But they misunderstand it. They think it's a collection of people in a geographical area over a finite period of time. Whereas in fact it can travel across every form of barrier. We know from celebrity copycat suicides that geography is no boundary, or even time."'

If true, it's chilling. The press have a lot to answer for.