Golden Gate Bridge Officials Vote for Suicide Net

"We were interested in this bridge, rather than subways where people also commit suicide, because it was a magnet -- people were coming from all over to jump," Birney said. "The old argument is: If they don't go here, they'll go somewhere else. That was a red herring. We knew we were right.''

In Toronto, public opinion was mixed, and opponents voiced concern that building a suicide barrier at the Bloor Street Viaduct would only divert jumpers to another bridge. Among the material presented to the Toronto council was a study concerning two Washington, D.C., bridges, the Duke Ellington and the Taft. The structures were a block apart, but the Ellington bridge was the favorite of the suicide-prone. When a suicide barrier was installed on the Ellington bridge in 1986, suicides there stopped, and the rate of suicide at the Taft bridge did not increase.

Opponents to fences on bridges (known as a “suicide barrier” in these discussions) cite the belief that people will just find another way to commit suicide. And yet all of the research data we have suggests that for the vast majority of people, that is simply untrue. It’s one of those repeated false beliefs that has no backing of actual data.

That’s because suicide is an irrational act, but people engage in discussions about people who are temporarily suicidal as though they were making rational decisions and choices. “Hey, if they find a fence on our bridge, they’ll just go home and shoot themselves,” is one common refrain from opponents. Luckily for most people, this isn’t the case. People choose very specific means to end their lives, and they generally don’t switch between methods. And most don’t find other methods.

Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus and psychologist at the University of California, published a study showing that the vast majority of people who are thwarted from jumping from a bridge don’t go on to commit suicide:

In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 " an astonishing 515 individuals in all " he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” (PDF) remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves.

He also published a ground-breaking article (Seiden & Spence, 1982) that looked at the suicide rates between the two bridges in San Francisco, the Golden Gate and the Oakland Bay Bridge, and wasn’t surprised to find the Golden Gate is the more popular suicide magnet. One in which over 2,000 people have jumped to their deaths from since its opening in 1937.

Need more evidence? Another study conducted in England also found a significant reduction in suicides (more than 50%) after a fence was installed on the local bridge (Bennewith et al., 2007). Just as importantly, they also found no evidence of increased jumping from other sites in the geographic region due to the erection of the fences.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Seiden said, “people who attempt suicide aren’t thinking clearly. They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B. They get fixated. They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to go shoot myself.’ And that fixation extends to whatever method they’ve chosen. They decide they’re going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge, or maybe they decide that when they get there, but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don’t look around for another place to do it. They just retreat.”

“The more obstacles you can throw up, the more you move it away from being an impulsive act. And once you’ve done that, you take a lot of people out of the game. If you look at how people get into trouble, it’s usually because they’re acting impulsively, they haven’t thought things through,” noted Matthew Miller, the associate director of the Injury Control Research Center, in the New York Times article. Time. That’s what most people who are thinking irrationally need. And that’s what a suicide barrier provides.

This misperception that we cannot stop people from hurting themselves is false " research data shows that we can. Because suicide is often an irrational, in-the-moment act, simple barriers are extremely effective in helping a person make the choice to live another day until the crisis has past.

But... I would be interested to see if there are any studies on how these measure affect overall suicide rates. I might be convinced to support a net if there was research clearly showing that people weren't just changing methods.

Putting telephones on these locations is a great idea (and easy to tell if they are being used).

Ammiano and other advocates of a barrier say emotional accounts from family members of the dead helped sway the board. And so did the 2006 film, "The Bridge," which captured people jumping from the span, said Paul Muller, a board member of The Bridge Rail Foundation.

"That film puts the horror on a world stage," said Muller, who called the movie "embarrassing" for bridge officials.

Writing to the board last summer, San Francisco resident Paul J. Miller expressed a view that many others had raised: "Attention should be given to mental health assistance," he wrote, "not paying tens of millions of dollars to contractors who are just trying to milk money from citizens."

On the other hand, the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California has supported the idea, contending that the effectiveness of barriers has been "dramatic" at such landmarks as the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower.

The group also cites a study of 515 people who were stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. It concluded that 94% of them were alive or had died naturally long after their thwarted attempts.