Coronation Street tackles one society's biggest horrors

Perhaps in an effort to increase audience ratings, all sorts of horrors and sensations keep happening in areas that only are supposed to have a relatively small local population, and where in real life small communities such incidents would happen less rarely.

But Coronation Street, the extraordinarily long-running series, has introduced a story that is a terrible but genuinely not uncommon experience in communities across the land, and so is not unrealistic — suicide.

Even so, introducing the death of a character at his own hand — as is the case with Aidan Connor, who is depicted by the actor Shayne Ward — is a difficult and sensitive and risky thing to do (risky for society, not for the programme).

The people who run Coronation Street say that they want to increase awareness of male suicide, which is a noble thing to try to do. But raising the profile of suicide can increase its incidence: as Coronation Street seems to be all too aware.

The screenwriters have therefore done something that the media is also advised to do: not in any way to glamorise the death or show the method of dying or make it look a remotely attractive thing to do.

Suicide ends the life of the person who carries it out and devastates those that they leave behind.

It is one of the most horrific things that can happen to a family or community and one of the deepest problems facing societies around the world. In Northern Ireland we too have alarming numbers of suicides.

Shayne Ward has reacted to the online messages he has seen about suicide, as a result of his character’s fate becoming known. “If you feel lost, you are not,” he tells TV fans.

It is a message that cannot be repeated forcefully or often enough, particularly to young people who might not fully realise that bad times, even the worst times, do pass.