9th
July
2008
Guns don’t kill people, bridges do
posted by saurabh in Insanity, Levity |Well, it seems once again the people who manage the Golden Gate Bridge are considering installing a suicide barrier (previously feted by hibiscus in this brilliant comment). The barrier would be a 12-foot tall fence, or possibly nets - yes, nets - to catch the jumpers, like so many fish flopping off the deck of a boat. Suicidal people wouldn’t be killing themselves, after all, if they didn’t have a bridge to jump off. I mean, it’s not like they can just swallow some pills, or something. Wait, can they? Oh, nuts! We should ban those - and maybe also rope, which could conceivably be used to form a noose, if they knew how to tie knots. Perhaps we should ban knots?
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The point is that if we fish them out of the nets, maybe we can get them the help they need. As opposed to letting them plummet to their deaths.
And why would they jump into the net?
Actually, scratch that. I think I’M going to jump into the net.
I think the point is that the many suicides on the bridge have a high enough profile and a dramatic enough arc that they are suspected to have actually caused an epidemic of suicides. Suicidal people don’t live in a vacuum, and the “demand” for suicidal methods is not so ineleastic. There are influences which make depressed people more or less likely to act on their impulses, and many think that a bridge barrier would not merely drive them to other, easier methods but actually but a brake on the compulsive thought process that leads to more suicides. It may be a local phenomenon–but the bridge figures largely in the local aesthetic of suicide.
Well, here you can read the Medical Examiner’s report on deaths in the SF area for 2004-2005, which, on page 26 of the PDF, includes a table of methods for suicide over the past decade. Jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge is a tiny fraction of local suicides, at best. Pills and firearms are the vast majority, not surprisingly. Even hanging beats out the Bridge by a wide margin. So I don’t really accept that the availability of the Bridge is a significant draw towards suicide, since other methods seem to be so much more popular.
A better way to deal with suicide might be to actually increase access to mental health care. The money spent installing nets might instead be spent running a free mental health clinic for a few years.
Ergh, the above comment is flawed, since GG suicide statistics are apparently handled by Marin County, not SF. The latter reports 213 jumps over a decade, which is a much higher yearly average (though still losing out to pills and guns) and maybe invalidates my above point. Still it seems unlikely to me that none of these people would have killed themselves if there was a barrier in place, and I do think it’s a rather cartoonish way to react to suicide.
Incidentally, the last page of this report on Marin County bridge jumpers is worth a glance - it lists the occupations of all the jumpers, a truly motley list that, surprisingly, includes a fair number of mental health workers. The report also states that 39% of jumpers were receiving some sort of mental health care, which maybe completely invalidates my above argument.
I agree that the money for the nets would be money misspent.
I think the coroner’s report offers too little to invalidate your argument. Good mental health care and the availability of it might reduce the suicide rate. The National Institutes of Health is very keen on cog psych behavior modification therapy, but it’s not clear that the therapy itself has more value than simply giving the patients someone who will listen to them talk about their problems. It does reduce the suicide attempt rate of people who have previously attempted it. There’s no support for it on an epidemiological level. I take the number of health care workers and people under treatment committing suicide as an indication that cog psych behavior modification may be contributing factor.
did you see the name of the person who did the report for the marin psych fdn? her middle name is Hope.
i’ve heard that most people who are stopped in a suicide attempt never try to kill themselves again. that alone seems a good argument for a barrier.
The author of this article is a total nutjob. Why wouldnt you want to install a suicide prevention barrior if it meant that it could save lives. Nobody’s saying that knots or rope or pills are being banned. Ass
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