The Moira refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos “houses” more than 9,000 migrants, many plucked from the Mediterranean and brought ashore by NGOs.

The camp was built to hold 3,100 people. The current figure is just over 9,000. Raw sewerage runs everywhere.

Medecins Sans Frontieres reports: “In group mental health activities for children (aged between six and 18 years) between February and June this year… nearly a quarter of the children had self-harmed, attempted suicide or thought about committing suicide.”

There are many other camps in the same dire situation dotted along coastal areas and further inland, particularly in Spain and Italy.

MSF says that the only remedy which will work is for other EU countries to accept higher numbers of migrants. But this is unlikely. The Visegrad countries – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – have slammed their doors shut in the face of desperation. The racist right in the rest of Europe is striding forward, while once-moderate parties back off in fear of losing votes.

The day-to-day lives of the children of Moira provide an obvious explanation of their distress and despair and suicidal feeling. No mystery. “I’m gonna lose it anyway / The losing card of some delay / So this is all I have to say / That suicide is painless.”

My friend Robert (not his real name) came to see me one day a few years ago. He sat at our kitchen table and recalled again (I’d heard it before) being driven by a social worker from Derry to Kircubbin in Co. Down and handed over to a priest at the doorstep of a “home”. “A quarter of an hour later, he was pulling my trousers down.”

He had been given over by a State official into the hands of abusive priests. To whom could he complain? He was alone in the world. Kircubbin featured heavily in a recent BBC Spotlight programme on child abuse in the North. Too late to offer Robert any fleeting sense of vindication. A few weeks after we’d sat at the kitchen table, he was found hanging from a fire escape on the Northland Road.

No great mystery there, either.

But many, maybe most, readers will know of cases which prompt only disbelief and bafflement.

Canvassing in the Creggan the year before last, I gave a woman at her doorstep the usual spiel. A cryptic account of the socialist line, then, “Is there anything in particular you’re concerned about?” That the Western Health Board’s suicide counsellor hadn’t been replaced, she responded on the instant.

Her son had been engaged to be married. She remembered him laughing with his fiancée on a Friday night as they planned who they would place beside whom at the reception. On Monday, she found him dead. She doesn’t know why. Nobody could make sense of it. Probably, nobody ever will. All we do know is that he hadn’t felt able to talk to family, friends or his fiancée about whatever demons were fluttering within him. He was among the growing number of young people in the North who choose to check out of life.

Why is this? It’s 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement. How come there have been more deaths from suicide since then than there’d been deaths over the course of the Troubles?

In the 30 years between the first civil rights march to spark disorder, in October 1968, and the signing of the Agreement in April 1998, just over 3,600 people met violent deaths. Over the next 16 years, 3,709 deaths by suicide were recorded.

Siobhan O’Neill, professor of mental health sciences at the University of Ulster’s School of Psychology, has led a research team in the only major study so far of links between suicidal behaviour and the Troubles. She found that 39 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population had had a traumatic experience related to the conflict. Partially at least, this can explain suicide rates among the middle-aged. But why should teenagers, who likely never witnessed shooting or bombing or serious street violence, be more troubled in their hearts than their parents’ generation?

O’Neill suggested that, “When one person sees something awful, when one person is traumatised, it will affect how they relate to everybody else, including how they relate to their children, their grandchildren… When you’re a child growing up in poverty, being parented by people who’ve been traumatised, and everyone around you has been traumatised, you are going to be affected by that, even if you’ve never seen anything. Even if they never tell you the stories.”

Tens of thousands lived for years in a state of constant anxiety, fearful for their children’s future, for their safety, hearing the cracks of shots and the thump of bombs or a neighbour’s door being kicked in, screams and curses. You are not going to come through unscathed, even if you have never been “involved”.

The effect of the Troubles, endlessly rippling through life, passes down. Sometimes you get to feel that half the population of the North is in bits.

At a Wood Burning Savages gig at the Nerve Centre in the summer, singer Paul Connolly broke off twice to deliver a piece of advice to anyone feeling down. “Talk to somebody, talk to anybody, if you have no one else, talk to me.”

Inadequate as it might prove to be, it’s probably the only advice worth offering.

As for the children of Moira, nothing short of revolution will do.