I turn off on the dodgy road to Shwt, which to the non-Welsh ear sounds somewhere between “shoot” and “shit.” A blind curve descends to a narrow stone bridge over a little river rippling through a grove of dwarf oaks. It’s a glorious, sun-flooded spring morning. The oaks are still leafless, but daffodils are out everywhere, the gorse is spattered with yellow blossoms, and the tits and thrushes are singing their hearts out. There’s nothing suicidal about this rolling, pastoral landscape, drenched with the sense of being inhabited for thousands of years, that I can detect. But a few years ago, a local 17-year-old boy left his car running and gassed himself here.

While there has always been a lot of suicide in the lowlands of South Wales, what’s been happening lately in the county borough of Bridgend is something different and very troubling. Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay. This isn’t just a series of unrelated, individual acts. It’s an outbreak—a localized epidemic—of a desire to leave this world that is particularly contagious to teenagers, who are impressionable and impulsive and, apparently in Bridgend, not finding many reasons for wanting to stick around. It represents, if the official statistics are to be believed, a fivefold increase in Bridgend’s young-male suicide rate in three years.

Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can’t find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel’s publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.

Publicity dramatically accelerates the spread of the contagion. In the late 1970s, there were a number of self-immolations in England and Wales, and within a year after the media picked up on them, the toll shot up to 82. Many of them were women in their 30s, even though mature adults have more life under their belts and are less vulnerable than adolescents to mass psychogenic behavior, and females are statistically much less prone to take their own lives. But humans in general are highly suggestible, especially when things aren’t falling into place.

This particular epidemic in Wales has followed the pattern. On January 17 of last year, the first female—and the 15th suicide in the cluster—a pretty 17-year-old named Natasha Randall, was found hanging in her bedroom in Blaengarw, a depressed former coal-mining town a few miles north of here. This was front-page stuff. The tabloids descended on Bridgend, and the story went national, then international, in less than a week. The sudden global attention precipitated—or permitted—four hangings over the next month. Three of them were girls. It is unusual for girls to hang themselves. Girls care more about how they are going to look, a suicide specialist told me. They overdose or cut their wrists. They are more prone to do it as a cry for help than to go through with it. (This is known in psychopathological parlance as parasuicide: deliberate self-harm without real suicidal intent.)