There is Bottle Alley, the half-mile-long covered promenade, its concrete walls decorated with a mosaic made from thousands of broken bottles. There are the museums of embroidery and artificial flower making, and a medieval siege tent where you can hear the 1066 story narrated by Richard Baker. The Festival of Morris Dancing has been and gone, but the Town Criers Championships are coming up. Something for everyone, it seems, in this cornucopia of Merrie England. But beneath the cheery facade, something rather terrifying is happening in this white-stuccoed seaside town. The Hastings tourist board’s jokey slogan, “Popular with visitors since 1066″, might be more aptly replaced by something along the lines of “Tops for topping yourself”, because today the town is most remarkable for being one of the nation’s suicide blackspots.

The South East Thames region to which it belongs has up to 18 suicides per 100,000 compared with the national average of 12. About 20 people die by their own hand in the Hastings area each year.
High on the hill overlooking Hastings, in the airy, well-appointed Conquest Hospital, you will find Belinda Malone, one of about 60 full-time “suicide nurses” now working in Britain. Her hair in a neat, crispy perm, she wears a flowing, dark blue dress and a look of genuine but professionally detached concern. “In the past two to three years, there’s really been a mushrooming of suicide specialists,” she says, smiling calmly. “America’s suicide rate hasn’t gone up since the Seventies, Germany’s is falling, but Britain’s is still rising.

People like me are popping up all over the place.”Malone, a Registered Mental Nurse, starts her shift at eight o’clock each weekday morning. Entering the Conquest’s pristine, light-filled accident and emergency department, she finds a cluster of up to six overnight referrals waiting to see her. Most have been admitted between 8pm and midnight the previous night and will have been given medical treatment.Spending anything up to seven hours with a patient, Malone gives counselling and plans a “package of care” for them, often by liaising between health and social services. She sees about 500 patients in the course of a year, 90 per cent of whom, she says, were glad to still be alive. None of them, she believes, has gone on to commit suicide, and only a couple have made further attempts “I see people through glass if you like Emotionally I have to be distant.

Two of the patients have got to me so far.”Spring is, of course, busier for suicides. March this year has been very busy, and we get a lot of attempted suicides in July,” Malone explains breezily “Hastings is a holiday area. People try to escape their problems by coming away and, when they get here, they realise it doesn’t work. It is, quite literally, the end of the road for a lot of people.”This morning she has six patients: four men in their thirties and two women, one aged 16, the other aged 40. All six are local, all are “attempters” who have acted impulsively in a moment of crisis rather than making a more determined, planned effort to end their lives.

All six have taken overdoses of pills.As a group they are representative of the majority of attempted suicides, 80 per cent of whom do not have mental health problems, 93 per cent of whom take overdoses of pills. They also coincide with a new report published by the Samaritans last Friday which shows that, for the first time, the number of calls from men has overtaken those from women: 1.21 million men called the Samaritans in 1994, 10,000 more than women. Furthermore, in the past 10 years the suicide rate among men aged 35-44 has increased by a third, while the rate among those aged 15 to 24 is rising.Malone makes a clear distinction between attempted suicides (impulsive cries for help) and suicide attempts (planned, genuine attempts to die). A large proportion of successful suicides are achieved by car exhaust poisoning and hanging, methods that don’t allow for second thoughts. “Psychological autopsies” (retrospective evaluations through interviews with relatives) show that up to 90 per cent of those who actually complete suicide have mental health problems.”Six patients sounds a lot,” says Malone, “but fortunately they are relatively easy cases today I’d say they’re all here because of relationship problems Distressed rather than depressed,” says Malone “The older woman, for example, had a row with her husband.