The first time Jonny tried to kill himself, the ambulance parked just beyond his front door, as if the paramedics were mindful of drawing attention to the house. Despite the fact that the local papers brought news of suicides every week, using words like “epidemic,” there was still an element of Catholic shame about it all. When they carted him off to hospital to pump the tablets out of his stomach, his mother didn’t go with him.

Jonny was my best friend for years. We matched in several ways: dark hair, dark eyes, and glasses. People mistook us for siblings. There were five of us: me, Jonny, Jonny’s brother Jimmy, Mick, and Tanya, a sweet-natured English girl. But, as childhood friends do, we grew apart. The last I’d heard of Jonny, until Mick knocked on my door, was that he had been taken to the mental-health hospital.

I lived in the street for three more years after that. When I left, his house had been boarded up, the windows barricaded with sheets of rusted metal.

* * *

When someone dies by suicide, they leave behind questions. Attend a wake or a funeral in such circumstances and you’ll hear them, posed by tortured family members: Why did she do it? Why didn’t he talk to me? Why didn’t she say goodbye?

Those were not the sort of questions that Mike Tomlinson, a professor of sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, could answer. What he could do, though, was talk about the broader picture. “Essentially, the story since 1998, which just so happens to be the [year of the] peace agreement, is that our suicide rate almost doubles in the space of 10 years.” In the 32-year gap from 1965 (four years before the Troubles began) to 1997, 3,983 deaths by suicide were recorded. In the 16 years after the 1998 peace agreement, through the end of 2014, 3,709 people died by suicide—roughly the same number over half the amount of time. Over the last few years, Tomlinson’s research has mainly focused on one question—why?

“Now, that trend [the almost doubling of the suicide rate since 1998] is wholly out of line with what happens everywhere else,” says Tomlinson. He describes a presentation he gave at Stormont, the parliament buildings of Northern Ireland, that includes graphs of the trends in suicide in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. “Of all the presentations I’ve done in my career,” he says, “there’s an audible gasp from the audience every time I’ve done that [one].”

Researchers caution that some suicides that took place in the period before 1998 may not have been recorded as such, due to religious norms and relatives’ shame. Yet during his research, Tomlinson discovered that of all suicides registered in Northern Ireland between 1965 and 2012 (7,271 in total), 45 percent were recorded from 1998 onwards. It’s the oddest of anomalies: If the official statistics can be taken at face value, more people are killing themselves in peacetime than in war.