In January last year, Dai Dilling was doing well, all things considered. The 19-year-old had run away from home, got into trouble, lived on the streets and dabbled in drugs. But like others in Bridgend, he had found hope by attending Yellow Wales, a youth project centre where he made friends, went on training courses and found somewhere safe to stay, at Yellow’s lodgings in Maesteg, eight miles away.

After two years of stop-start progress, Dai was hired as a construction worker. He was enjoying the job and, as far as the Yellow Wales employees knew, felt optimistic about the future. But on January 5, his world turned. Dai’s old friend Dale Crole, a small-time drug dealer, was found hanged at a disused warehouse near Porthcawl’s Coney Beach funfair. It was one of their old drinking haunts. Dai was a pall bearer at Dale’s funeral and, less than a month later, he too hanged himself.

It was the beginning, in this unremarkable corner of Wales, of a spate of youth suicides. Last year the youth suicide rate quadrupled – in the past 18 months, 22 young people have killed themselves. Bridgend, population 40,000, found itself branded “the suicide capital of Britain” (The Guardian); “the town of death” (the Daily Star), though the incidents actually took place across a 110-square-mile borough with a population of 130,000. The press depicted a region sunk into depression by the collapse of the mining industry; an ugly, isolated backwater where binge drinking, unemployment and cheap drugs were ubiquitous. Some journalists also claimed to have uncovered a more lurid cause: an internet suicide cult.

I left Bridgend in the 1980s. The quiet market town of my youth has, until now, only momentarily flickered into national view. There were the triumphs of its native rugby greats – J.P.R. Williams, Rob Howley – and the scandal of William Tudor, the butcher whose e-coli-infected meat killed a five-year-old boy three years ago. But nothing like the “Bridgend suicides”. An old schoolfriend, now a teacher in the town, told me that youngsters in the area were horribly shaken. “It’s been awful. You go into a classroom full of big, stocky boys and they’re all in tears.”

When I was growing up, teenage suicides in the town were unheard of. Back then, Bridgend was a bit scruffy, but it had decent schools, good sports facilities and a lively town centre. I still visit regularly and relish the unspoilt countryside. But like a good half of my academically minded contemporaries, once I went away to university I never settled here again.

For youngsters with fewer prospects, suicide seems to have been the escape. Only a week after Dai Dilling’s death, Tom Davies, another troubled youth, committed suicide. Tom drank heavily and was facing a court appearance. Although he knew both Dai and Dale, he seemed little affected by their deaths, friends say. Several people, including Tracey Miles, training officer at Yellow Wales, believe his suicidal feelings may have come to a head after a drunken accident left him with serious facial wounds. “He was a lovely good-looking boy and a charmer with the ladies,” Miles recalls. “He was very upset that he was going to have this unsightly scar.”

In its three-year life, Yellow has worked with 129 youngsters. Though it does not offer psychiatric support, it provides accommodation, basic training in skills from computing to cookery, and opportunities to try sports such as boxing. Crucially, the centre teaches youngsters how to apply for jobs – and once they get them, how to keep them. KPC, a similar facility in nearby Pyle, helps disadvantaged eight- to 25-year-olds, and is acclaimed nationwide. Yet, for all the good work of such centres, regulars complain they can’t avoid the harsh realities of homelessness and unemployment.

“I’ve been trying for ages to get a job, but I just can’t,” says a young woman at Yellow. She is skinny and sullen, her Bridgend accent thick and plaintive. “I haven’t got any qualifications and I haven’t got a home so that makes things harder.”

Jamie, a spikey-haired teen, says: “I’ve just got myself a part-time bar job but it’s ridiculous because anything I make in wages I’ll lose from my benefits.” He and others also complain about the recent Polish immigration wave to the area – a shock to a warm and friendly but largely inward-looking community that for centuries has been overwhelmingly Welsh. Polish newcomers get priority housing and are taking jobs that should be given to locals, the youngsters complain. Miles looks embarrassed and tries to shush them. But there is no hiding the scale of the issue.

Bridgend has struggled to evolve over the past 50 years. Until the 1960s, it was a traditional market town, its three neighbouring valleys dominated by coal mines. When the last of the mines closed 23 years ago, valley villages were left behind, bereft of the pit miners they were built to shelter.

Some of these villages have been trying to move on. Blaengarw, at the extreme end of the Garw Valley, has built a new community park, and has plans for a railway. But there has been no economic leap forward. There is only a handful of shops and a typical three-bedroom house sells for barely £90,000 if it sells at all, compared with at least twice that 10 miles away in Bridgend town, and a British average closer to £200,000.

Natasha Randall, 17, killed herself here in January – the 13th of the deaths. Over the preceding year, the hangings of Dale Crole, Dai Dilling and Tom Davies had been followed by those of Allyn Price, 21; Anthony Martin, 19; James Knight, 26; Leigh Jenkins, 22 (who knew Allyn); Zachary Barnes, 17; Jason Williams, 21; Andrew O’Neill, 20; Liam Clarke, 20; and Gareth Morgan, 27 (who knew Liam). Not all the deaths have been ruled as suicides by the coroner, but none is considered as suspicious.

After Natasha’s suicide, there was a month that brought four further hangings: Angeline Fuller, 18; Nathaniel Pritchard, 15; Kelly Stephenson, 20 (Nathaniel’s cousin); and Jenna Parry, 16. And since February there have been five more: Michelle Sheldon, 23; Sean Rees, 19; Christopher Jones, 23; Neil Owen, 26; and Carwyn Jones, 28. The bulk of the deaths have taken place in the more run-down parts of the borough or in the town’s tired old housing estates.

All those close to the suicides – friends and family, youth workers and Samaritans, politicians and police – seem to believe there was no great mystery to these deaths, no suicide cult as the tabloids suggested, no death pacts. If the deaths were linked, it was because the youngsters had been thrown together in ill fortune, says Madeleine Moon, the local MP.

To anatomise that “ill fortune” is difficult. If economic factors were involved, it is hard to measure their psychological impact with precision. If there is a more clandestine malaise at work, it has yet to be uncovered, though academic research recently suggested phone masts might have triggered depression in the victims. The police and coroner are still investigating many of the cases, but say there are no links between them and no suggestion of suspicious motives. What is clear, ironically, is that the market town of Bridgend today is a far more prosperous place than when I was a teenager there.

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Where Bridgend’s old cattle market traded 25 years ago, a huge Tesco now stands. And to the east of the centre, where once there was farmland, there are now sprawling Ford and Sony factories. But regeneration has been fitful. Ray Pearce, head of economic development on the town council, estimates Bridgend has lost about 8,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000. That amounts to nearly 15 per cent of the borough’s working population.

The biggest blow was delivered by Sony, whose factory had been the town’s largest private-sector employer for more than 20 years. It laid off all but 450 of the 5,000 staff it employed at its peak in 1999. As traditional television manufacture has given way to flat-screen production in more cost-competitive locations, Slovakia has become Sony’s new European TV production hub – and Bridgend in particular is feeling the loss.

Service-sector employers – call centres, software developers and accountancy firms – have taken up some of the slack, but it’s not on the same scale. Pearce puts his hopes in small businesses, which have increased in number by a third over the past decade. Spectrum Technologies, for example, a business with 70 staff and an annual turnover of £7m, is the world’s biggest manufacturer in the niche business of laser-printing wiring for the aerospace industry. It relocated from Bristol to Bridgend in 1990 after local development funding and a package of grants helped fund expansion of up to 40 per cent a year. “We looked in north Bristol and we thought of going to Oklahoma,” says Peter Dickinson, Spectrum’s chief executive. “But the agencies were remarkably efficient at attracting us here.”

Logica, meanwhile, one of Britain’s biggest technology companies, employs 670 people here. Bridgend is an “onshore low-cost delivery model,” it says. In other words, Wales is far cheaper than London, but not as cheap as Bangalore. Steve Richards, who runs the company’s global customer services operation, says staff are unusually motivated, thanks in part to a lack of local competition for Logica’s kind of workforce. “We have sickness rates of 2 or 3 per cent, compared with an industry-wide level of 20 or 30 per cent,” he says. Staff attrition is also low.

The financial inducements can be persuasive, too. According to Eurostat, the European statistics agency, the West Wales and the Valleys area is poorer than Slovenia. As a result, the area qualifies for so-called Community First funding – European Union money that is typically granted in tandem with Welsh Assembly grants and other financing. That combination of European aid, political lobbying and an able workforce helped Wales attract £335m of capital investment and 3,500 new jobs from overseas in 2006-07, as well as £75m and 3,000 new jobs from elsewhere in the UK. In all, Wales, which has only 5 per cent of the UK’s population, has won 9 per cent of the UK’s inward investment.

But these economic success stories only go so deep. Spectrum and Logica represent a process of modernisation that has taken place alongside the Bridgend area’s deindustrialisation. While these companies recruit locally and collaborate successfully with the technology-focused Bridgend College, some employers admit there is a shortfall for high-skilled positions.

The unskilled, meanwhile, find life more and more difficult. There is a stratum of society in Bridgend, particularly in the borough’s outlying areas, that feels alienated – unqualified for the jobs that are available, left behind by technological advance. And the situation appears worse here than elsewhere in the country. Nearly one in five people of working age in Bridgend has no qualifications, compared with a national average of one in seven.

What’s more, 13 per cent of working-age people are on incapacity benefits, nearly twice the already high UK tally. This may be logical enough: many former miners and steel workers are chronically sick. But core unemployment is also high, with 10 per cent of working-age men registered unemployed. That statistic is again nearly double the national average, although officials argue the figures have been temporarily inflated by manufacturing closures that are now being offset by new jobs elsewhere. Most disturbing, youth unemployment is far higher here than elsewhere in the UK.

For many of the apparent suicide victims, that economic hopelessness seemed to have combined with other factors –- family breakdown, boy or girlfriend trouble, as well as the ripple effect of one death after another – to create a fatal cocktail of circumstances. Drug and alcohol abuse also played its predictable part.

“Alcohol is a big issue here,” says local MP Madeleine Moon. Youth workers such as Lynn James, who runs the town’s Solid Rock Cafe youth club, agree. “Cider is so cheap, it’s stupid,” he says. “That’s one of the big problems – the freedom to buy alcohol.” The Spar outlet near Bridgend’s bus station, an evening mecca for youngsters meeting up from the valleys and the coast, sells a 2-litre flagon of 6 per cent alcohol Special VAT cider for £2.49. Philip Walters, the regional coroner, says alcohol was evident in at least four of the suicides.

The agencies can’t agree, though, about the extent to which drugs have been a factor in the deaths. Darren Matthews, director of the local Samaritans group, says: “Bridgend has drugs. But there’s nothing special about it. Every similar town in the country is the same.”

Police say they have clamped down. Operation Hutton, a three-month sting launched last spring, led to 50 arrests. All but four of the detainees were charged over the supply of heroin and cocaine. A follow-up “rat on a rat” campaign has, according to police, elicited a 400 per cent increase in calls from the public to the Crimestoppers whistleblower hotline and a big drop in burglaries and car crime over the past year.

Schools remain jumpy, nonetheless. Twelve-year-olds recently came home from Brynteg Comprehensive, the town’s leading secondary school, telling parents they had been warned by teachers about the perils of strawberry-flavoured “crystal meth”. Police say schools had been the target of a “hoax or urban myth” e-mail, containing a fictitious warning that “strawberry quick” was being handed to children outside schools.

Youth workers warn against complacency. “There is a drugs problem in Bridgend,” says one. “Last year, in particular, heroin was very freely available. It was cheaper than blow [cocaine].” Drugs were undeniably mixed up in the recent suicides, they say. “Some of them were certainly involved in the drugs culture,” says Moon. “Some were on the fringes of the drugs trade.” The coroner has cited the role of MDMA, cocaine, morphine and valium in at least three of the hangings.

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While Bridgend has stood out over the past year, there have been similar suicide clusters before – from Tampa, Florida, to Northern Ireland, Staffordshire and Glasgow. In each cluster, media coverage was intense, and the victims knew of each other. Though the Bridgend victims lived across the borough, many of them came to youth centres, to college and for nights out in the town. Moon says that some of them also knew each other from the old “pupil referral unit” for excluded schoolchildren in Aberkenfig. The other apparently sinister aspect of the Bridgend suicides – that they were, unusually, almost all hangings – is also a form of copycatting, say experts. “When one person takes their life this way, it gives permission for others to take their lives, too,” says Matthews at the Samaritans. “Hanging clearly worked, so it was copied.”

Walters, the coroner, dispels the myth that hanging is unusual, as many reports have suggested. That is true elsewhere, but not in Wales, he says. “In our region, hanging has been the main method chosen for suicides for a long time.”

There has been a lot of scrambling by politicians and voluntary groups in recent months to put together “suicide prevention strategies” – both for the borough of Bridgend and Wales – with more outreach work by agencies such as the Samaritans and more publicity in schools, colleges and youth clubs about how to get help. Nearly £2m of Lottery money was recently allocated to anti-suicide projects in the Bridgend area. Longer term, youth centres such as Yellow argue that their hand-to-mouth financing, much of which comes from Lottery funds, needs to be made more secure.

One concern voiced by some politicians is that, for all the Welsh Assembly’s dynamism in attracting inward investment, it is failing to help those with no employment, education or training. “Some Assembly figures are more interested in being different than being effective,” says one Welsh MP. “The problem in Wales is that it is a nation of only 3 million people, yet it is fragmented into 22 local areas, with 60 Assembly members.”

The Assembly insists that it has plans to spur on the valley communities. Leighton Andrews, deputy minister for regeneration at the Assembly, holds out the example of the neighbouring Rhondda Valley, where improvements in infrastructure have turned former depressed areas into a thriving commuter belt. “We’ve definitely seen people leaving the urban areas of Cardiff and Newport for the valleys, where housing is cheaper,” says Andrews.

Even without big improvements to roads, and a limited rail service, something similar is already happening in the Bridgend valleys, says Carwyn Jones, Welsh Assembly member for the borough. “Very few people actually work in the Garw or Ogmore valleys, but increasingly they are living there and working in the town,” he says.

In time, that should bring economic benefit to the valley communities, as relatively well-off commuters spend in local shops and perhaps initiate business ideas of their own. Bridgend has also begun a £75m five-year programme of council house upgrades.

Given such grand plans, and real evidence that the area is overhauling its economy, it is little wonder that the community felt such disgust at the way some reports seized on a succession of human tragedies to brand Bridgend a failure.

It is months now since the most intense period of suicides, when reporters and television crews swamped Cefn Cribwr, in the aftermath of Jenna Parry’s hanging on February 18. She was the 17th of the Bridgend suicide cluster.

On my last visit there, the village seemed its calm, pretty self again. It was a day of dramatic hail showers and slanting sunbursts, hills rolling on one side and a sweeping sea view on the other. This feels as far from recent portrayals of the area as it is possible to get. But time hasn’t calmed the locals’ outrage at the hysterical media response to the suicides. In the quaint front-parlour post office opposite the Parrys’ home, I asked how people are coping. “We’ve had enough of journalists round here,” was the postmistress’s stern reply. “I’ve got nothing to say. I just feel for the family.”

In some ways, 16-year-old Jenna didn’t fit neatly into the apparent pattern – she was a trainee hairdresser with some prospects, and she lived in a stable family in a charming village. But like other victims, she struggled with the break-up of a relationship, and dabbled in drugs such as Valium. And like 16 other despairing youngsters before her, and another five since, she hanged herself. Today, there are few outward signs of the tragedy. The beige semi-detached house at number 11 Bryn Terrace is like any other in the village and the VW people carrier outside is pretty ordinary, too. The sole sign that this was Jenna’s home is a photograph of a smiling teenager propped against the dashboard. A hundred yards up the road “Miss you Jen” is scrawled on the wall of a disused garage.

In Cefn Cribwr and other communities touched by the Bridgend suicides, people seem finally to be picking themselves up and getting back to normal. Walters, the coroner, says: “We think the bubble has burst.” And he taps his plastic table. “Touch wood.”

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Patrick Jenkins is the FT’s companies editor.