The Suicide Epidemic In Wales

On the thirtieth of September 2024, Blast Furnace Number Four at the Port Talbot steelworks was shut down for the last time. Over a century of primary steelmaking in Wales, ended in a single afternoon. Two thousand workers given their marching orders before Christmas. The furnace cooled. The town fell silent. And somewhere in the back streets of Neath Port Talbot, in the terraced houses where steelworkers' families have lived for five generations, another man was making a decision from which there would be no return.

This is not a story about mental health. This is a story about what happens to men when you strip away their purpose, starve their prospects, and then look the other way while they die.

In 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics, 337 Welsh men took their own lives — the highest number ever recorded. The male suicide rate in Wales hit 25.0 per 100,000, the worst since ONS records began in 1981. Not since records began in the modern era. Since records began at all. And the previous record, 24.5 per 100,000, set in 2013? Smashed. Gone. Overtaken by a country sliding further and faster into a crisis nobody in Cardiff Bay or Westminster seems willing to name.

Suicide is now the biggest killer of men under fifty in Wales. One hundred and seventy-six men under fifty were lost to it in 2024 alone. The next biggest killer in the same age bracket was accidental poisoning — which for too many of those men was just another death of despair dressed in clinical language. Three out of every four suicides registered in Wales in 2024 were men. Seventy-seven per cent. Nearly one Welsh man dead by his own hand every single day.

And Wales, as of 2024, has overtaken Scotland to hold the highest suicide rate of all four United Kingdom nations. Let the weight of those words settle.

Where the Coal Dust Settled, the Graves Multiply

Pull up a map of suicide rates across Wales, and you will see something remarkable and terrible. The places where men are dying in the greatest numbers are not random. They are not scattered evenly across the country. They cluster with grotesque precision along one geographic belt — the old coal and steel corridor of South Wales.

Bridgend. Neath Port Talbot. Merthyr Tydfil. Rhondda Cynon Taf. Blaenau Gwent. These five local authority areas form the bleeding heart of the crisis, each returning suicide rates of 20 to 27 per 100,000 over sustained reporting periods — rates double and sometimes triple the figures seen in Cardiff or Monmouthshire.

Now overlay a second map: the historic coal mining regions of South Wales. The places where a quarter of a million men once worked underground. The places where iron and steel kept whole towns breathing.

The two maps are, to all meaningful purposes, the same map.

Blaenau Gwent, according to the WIMD 2025 results, has the highest proportion of areas in the most income-deprived ten per cent of Wales — twenty-two per cent of its small areas fall into this bracket. Blaenau Gwent also has the highest overall suicide rate in the country. Merthyr Tydfil, where seventy-two per cent of areas sit in the most deprived half of Wales, runs it close. These are not coincidences. They are consequences.

The coal mines are gone. The steelworks are going. And in the void left behind, men are dying — not from the old industrial diseases of silicosis and lung rot, but from something far harder to treat: the slow, corrosive certainty of having no future at all.

A Century of Proof Written in Blood

The relationship between industrial collapse and male suicide in Wales is not conjecture. It is one of the most robustly documented patterns in modern British public health.

When the coal mines were running at full tilt in the early twentieth century, producing over fifty million tonnes a year and employing hundreds of thousands, suicide rates among working-age men were already present but employment was stable. The Great Depression of the 1930s changed everything — mass unemployment arrived, severe poverty spread through the Valleys, and suicide rates climbed sharply across Britain. The first clear proof, written in the death registers of the era, of what happens when men lose their livelihoods.

After the Second World War came the lowest suicide rates of the twentieth century. Full employment. Stable demand for labour. Strong male economic roles. The coal was needed, the steel was needed, and the men who made them mattered. Suicide fell and fell.

Then came the decline.

Coal employment in Wales collapsed from a quarter of a million workers in the early 1900s to fewer than twenty thousand by the late 1980s. Entire communities lost their economic base in the space of a single generation. By the 1990s, coal mining had effectively ended. Steel contracted savagely. Whole towns in the Valleys simply never recovered.

Suicide rates tracked every stage of this collapse with merciless fidelity. Up through the 1970s and 1980s as the mines closed. Persistently high through the 1990s and 2000s as the promised regeneration failed to arrive.

And then, in 2007 and 2008, Bridgend.

"Death Town" — When the Young Started Dying in Clusters

Between 2007 and 2008, at least twenty-six young people murdered themselves in the small county borough of Bridgend. Most were teenagers. Nearly all of them hanged themselves. In the years between 1996 and 2006, Bridgend had averaged around three suicides a year. In 2007 alone, the number leapt to at least nine.

Peer-reviewed research published in PLOS ONE confirmed a statistically significant suicide cluster centred on Bridgend between December 2007 and February 2008, extending into neighbouring Neath Port Talbot. The media, naturally, descended like carrion birds, branding Bridgend "Death Town" and speculating wildly about suicide cults and online pacts. Police found no evidence of any coordinated activity.

What they found instead was something far more damning: a community hollowed out by decades of economic decline, where young men saw no path forward and began, one by one, to follow each other into the dark. Or as The Times put it, they did it for fame.

Bridgend's MP at the time, Madeleine Moon, issued a furious warning. Young people, she said, should not die waiting for charity funds. The media's sensationalist coverage was actively making things worse — the so-called Werther effect, where heavy reporting on suicide drives imitative behaviour, was identified as a real risk by researchers at Swansea University.

And then, as media interest faded, so did any sense of urgency. The cameras left. The column inches dried up. And the dying continued.

In 2008, Madeleine Moon said young people should not die waiting for help.

In 2024, 337 Welsh men died by suicide — the highest on record.

Nothing changed. The blood is still wet.

How Welsh Men Choose to Die

The method matters, and the method tells a brutal story. Across England and Wales, hanging accounts for approximately fifty-seven per cent of all suicides — but among men, the proportion is higher still. It is overwhelmingly the dominant method among Welsh males: cheap, readily available, devastatingly lethal. No prescription required. No dealer to find. No bridge to drive to. Just a belt, a beam, and a moment of final resolve in a quiet house where nobody is expected home.

Poisoning and overdose account for roughly a fifth of suicides and are more common among women. Jumping and drowning make up smaller proportions. But hanging's dominance among men is critical, because lethality of method is directly tied to completion rates. Women attempt suicide more often. Men die from it more often. And they die because they choose methods from which there is almost no coming back.

There is a grim historical lesson in this. In the 1960s, when British domestic gas was detoxified — removing the easy, common means of taking one's life by sticking one's head in the oven — overall suicide rates fell dramatically. The method disappeared, and many people who might have used it simply did not find another. The proof could not be clearer: when lethal methods become harder to access, people live. But nobody is proposing to take the rope out of reach. Nobody is even asking why so many men are reaching for it.

The Men Most Likely to Die

The profile of the highest-risk Welsh male suicide victim is consistent across decades of data which is easily found in official sources.

• He is male.
• He is between thirty and sixty years old.
• He lives in a deprived area.
• He is economically inactive or unemployed.
• He may live alone.
• He may drink too much.
• He is overwhelmingly concentrated in the former coal and steel regions.

A secondary cluster sits just below: young men aged eighteen to twenty-nine, disengaged from education, socially isolated, and frequently without meaningful employment. These are the boys of Bridgend, grown a few years older but no closer to a life worth living.

Economic inactivity — not unemployment, but the more devastating condition of having dropped out of the labour market altogether — runs far deeper in Wales than in the rest of the United Kingdom. In the year ending June 2024, 20.6 per cent of the Welsh working-age population (excluding students) was economically inactive, compared to 17.8 per cent nationally. The leading cause of inactivity, for both men and women, was long-term sickness. Between September 2020 and September 2024, the number of people in Wales who reported being economically inactive because of long-term illness increased by more than 37,000 — a rise of 6.4 percentage points, well above the British average of 4.4 (now 5.2, the highest since Covid).

And the places where inactivity is highest? Blaenau Gwent. Merthyr Tydfil. The same killing fields. The same names, appearing on every list of deprivation, poor health, low employment, and high death.

Males born in the most deprived areas of Wales can now expect to live 7.8 fewer years than those born in the least deprived areas, according to Public Health Wales — a gap which has widened from 6.8 years in 2011–13. In healthy life expectancy the picture is more savage still: men in the most deprived fifth can expect only about fifty-two years of life in good health, compared to nearly sixty-eight in the least deprived areas. A sixteen-year gap in healthy living, determined almost entirely by the postcode into which a boy is born.

Boys Who Never Got Started

This crisis does not begin in middle age. It begins in the classroom, years before the first drink is poured or the first redundancy letter arrives.

Across Britain, research has repeatedly shown catastrophically low GCSE pass rates among disadvantaged white boys — figures as low as 18.6 per cent achieving strong passes in English and Maths have been cited in England-focused studies, against national averages more than double their score. Wales uses its own accountability measures, but the pattern is replicated: boys from deprived Welsh households consistently trail behind girls in attainment, school readiness, and engagement. At every stage — Foundation Phase, GCSE, A-Level, university entry — females outperform males. By the time higher education beckons, women dominate university intake by a ratio approaching three to two.

None of this is mysterious. A boy growing up in Blaenau Gwent or Merthyr Tydfil can look around him and see exactly what awaits: a landscape of closed pits, shuttered shops, and adults who never recovered from the last round of redundancies. The mine is gone. The steelworks is going. The call centre pays just around minimum wage and treats its workers like battery hens. What, precisely, is a fifteen-year-old supposed to be studying for?

Educational disengagement is not a cause of suicide. It is an early symptom of the same disease — the collapse of perceived future opportunity. Psychological research has identified hopelessness, specifically the belief one's circumstances will never improve, as one of the most powerful predictors of suicide risk. It is not abstract theory. It is what happens when a boy looks ahead and sees nothing. No career. No trade. No craft. No role. No reason.

The causal chain is cumulative and it runs the same way every time:

Economic collapse strips away purpose. Reduced opportunity erodes hope. Educational disengagement follows as boys stop believing the system has anything to offer them. Unemployment or underemployment becomes entrenched. Social isolation deepens. Substance use rises. And at the end of it all, in a terraced house in the Valleys at three o'clock in the morning, a man reaches for a rope.

This is not one factor. It is all the factors, stacked on top of each other, pressing down with the weight of decades.

This Is Not Unique to Wales

The honest and uncomfortable truth is Wales is not alone. The same pattern — industrial collapse followed by male economic despair followed by elevated suicide rates concentrated in the abandoned regions — repeats with eerie consistency across the Western world.

• Appalachia, the American coal country running through West Virginia, Kentucky, and eastern Ohio.
• The mining and farming belts of northern France.
• The industrial wastelands of eastern Germany after reunification.
• The old manufacturing towns of northern England.

Everywhere the furnaces shut down and the purpose closed, the men followed.

This is not uniquely a Welsh problem. It is a universal consequence of stripping away the economic foundations of working communities and offering nothing in return. Wales simply happens to demonstrate the principle with horrifying clarity — because the collapse was so total, the geography so concentrated, and the political response so comprehensively absent.

Port Talbot lost its blast furnaces in 2024. Academics at the University of Leeds, studying earlier mass redundancies in the Welsh steel industry, found steelworkers faced "significant structural barriers to employment transitions" — and the redundancies produced measurable harm in health and housing. Dr Calvin Jones estimates Port Talbot's losses could strip £200 million per year from the town's gross earnings, nearly fifteen per cent of the total. An economic amputation performed without anaesthetic and without a surgeon's plan for recovery.

The Longest Silence in Welsh Politics

Since 2008 — since Bridgend, since Madeleine Moon stood up and said these boys should not have to die — what, precisely, has been done?

England has a Men's Health Strategy, announced by the Secretary of State on International Men's Day in November 2025. Greater London has a report on men's mental health. Birmingham has its own strategy. Ireland and Australia have theirs.

1. Wales has a Women's Health Plan, launched in December 2024.
2. Wales has no men's health strategy.
3. Wales has no male suicide prevention strategy.
4. Wales has no male suicide prevention taskforce.

The country with the highest male suicide rate since ONS records began — the country where one man dies by his own hand nearly every single day — has nothing. Barely a plan. Not a taskforce. Not even an acknowledgement of the scale of the catastrophe unfolding in real time within its borders. A nice-looking document thinking about it. Ish.

This is not an oversight. Oversights get corrected. This is the systematic deprioritisation of men who are dying in enormous numbers in the poorest communities in the country, while politicians in Cardiff Bay busy themselves with strategies, frameworks, and plans for everything and everyone except the people who are actually being buried.

No More Commissions. No More Frameworks. No More Silence.

Enough reports have been written. Enough data has been gathered. Enough researchers have confirmed what every grandmother in the Valleys could have told you for free: when men lose their work, their purpose, and their hope, they die. They die by the rope and the pill and the bridge and the bottle, and they die in numbers this country should be screaming about.

Three hundred and thirty-seven men in one year. Six thousand, two hundred and seventy-three men since the year 2000. Since 1981, the male suicide rate in Wales has increased by fifty-six per cent while the female rate has decreased by twenty-four per cent. The gap is not closing. It is yawning wider with every passing year, and the men falling into it are overwhelmingly from the same places — the coal towns, the steel towns, the Valley towns where Westminster and Cardiff Bay have poured precisely nothing for decades.

Do not tell these men about wellbeing frameworks. Do not offer them a leaflet. Do not commission another inquiry to sit on a shelf gathering dust while the coroners work overtime.

Give them work. Give them industries worth building. Give them apprenticeships, trades, and crafts with a future attached to them. Give their sons something to aim for beyond minimum wage and a zero-hours contract. Give their towns an economy rather than a charity case. Give their communities the dignity of being places where a man can raise a family and grow old, not places where the only growth industry is the funeral director's.

Every week, six and a half Welsh men die by their own hand. Nearly one per day. Every single one of them was someone's son. Many of them were someone's father. All of them deserved better than to live and die in a country too indifferent, too distracted, and too ideologically preoccupied to notice they were drowning.

The furnaces have gone cold. The mines are sealed. The boys are turning away from school because they can see, with the brutal clarity of youth, there is nothing on the other side.

And the men are dying.