There's Stairs, of Course, but Some Prefer to Take the Fast Way Down
Can you stand to hear even more news about gravity-complicit suicides at the golden gate bridge? An editorial in last week's Chron that argued in favor of an anti-jumping barricade has gotten folks talking. Bay Area Transportation News stirred things up by saying that a barrier would "deface" the bridge - as if the alternative, bodies plummeting to their death, is an attractive feature. Since local psychiatrists seem to be pretty gung-ho about the whole barrier idea, we asked our friendly neighborhood expert, Dr. Gordon Giles, for comment - he was quick to point out that crisis intervention isn't his specialty, but he is the director of neurobehavioral sciences for northern California's largest provider of mental health beds, which means that he knows more about broken brains than we ever will, and that's good enough for us.
"Placing barriers may be effective," he told us, but he didn't sound totally convinced. More ambivalent would-be jumpers might not jump is they were somehow restrained, but, Gordon said, "the more committed...will." Suicides are often impulsive acts, and a delay or impediment could provide opportunities for rescuers to intervene; or at the very least, for jumpers to have second thoughts. (In fact, there's a terribly flowery New Yorker article that touches on just that point.) In fact, a lot of survivors express gratitude for having lived through their attempt - once the crisis period is past, says Gordon, the likelihood of repeat is diminished. Not only that, but Toronto's "luminous veil," a barrier erected on another suicide-magnet, reduced the number of jumps to zero.
The argument can be made that a railing on the Golden Gate Bridge will only lead jumpers to settle on some other landmark to throw themselves off of (despite The New Yorker's description of The Bay Bridge as "tacky"). "You can say, 'those crazy impulsive jumpers, they'll only find another way to kill themselves,'" Gordon says, having correctly identified us as callous brutes. "But you could also say, 'why put seatbelts in cars? Those crazy impulsive drivers will only find some other way to kill themselves.'"