The Final Leap (19 page)

She says that the strategy has changed over the years. Early on, officers didn't mention suicide for fear that it would lead someone to jump. They didn't mention family, either, because that might be the reason why the person wanted to die. Today, officers know that asking about suicide is the best way to determine a person's intentions. It doesn't plant the seed in someone's mind because they're already at the bridge—they're already thinking about suicide. And questions are asked about the person's family (“Do you have a wife? Do you have kids?”) because that may generate guilt. Again, anything that works.

Even so, every intervention doesn't end successfully. “If you have been doing this job any length of time,” Locati says, “you've witnessed a jump and you've talked someone back down.” She estimates that she has talked down more than two hundred potential jumpers over the years. Still, it's the jumps that occur after talking with a person that are haunting. “If you make contact and the person jumps, it's definitely harder,” she says. “I was there when two people jumped at the same time. That will always be with me.” She also remembers one person who jumped after seven hours of contact. The officers who were involved probably will remember that for a long time, she says.

If a bridge phone is used to report a jump or someone in the throes of jumping, the call goes to Bridge District's security command center. Sometimes a motorist tells a tollbooth worker, or someone in the control room notices the situation on one of the many monitors connected to bridge cameras. If a cell phone is used to call 911, it's answered by the California Highway Patrol. Oftentimes a call goes to both the CHP and Bridge Patrol. Then it becomes a matter of who gets there first.

There are more than fifty cameras on the bridge. Bridge District officials won't disclose the actual number of cameras for security reasons. The cameras are mounted on cables, bridge towers, struts, and elsewhere. Security police can change pictures in an instant to any section of the bridge, then zoom in. The images are live—looking down on traffic, following bicyclists and pedestrians, monitoring the toll plaza. The whole underside of the bridge, including the tower footings, also is monitored, and the control room is staffed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The day I was there, one officer said that he had been on the job more than thirty years and the second officer more than twenty years. A smaller room next door has additional monitors and recording equipment. It's where Bridge Patrol officers go to rewind and review surveillance tapes.

Lights on the bridge make it possible to view camera images after nightfall. The bigger obstacle in terms of visibility is fog. From July to October—the worst months for misty conditions— two foghorns on the bridge sound continuously more than five hours per day. Small vessels that lack radar depend on the horns in order to enter and exit San Francisco Bay (each horn has a different pitch, and boats enter the bay between the two horns and exit between the mid-span horn and the north pier). When the fog is particularly dense, security personnel rely on sensors and alarm systems on the bridge that are activated by movement. Sightseers aren't out when visibility is low, so pedestrian traffic is minimal at those times.

Anytime bridge police have more than casual contact with someone, it's noted in a logbook. If the person isn't considered a serious risk, he or she is let go, but it's still noted in the logbook. The second logbook notation for an individual—or a more serious first-time attempt—results in a formal interview. The person is escorted off the bridge by security officers and taken into an interview room in the administration building parking lot. What happens next ultimately is left up to the California Highway Patrol, although Bridge Patrol personnel have a say. Persons who are thought to be probable jumpers are taken by the CHP to San Francisco General Hospital. At one time there were as many as fifteen hospitals that police transported people to for drop-in treatment or hospital hold, but many of them—like Letterman and Mt. Zion—are closed now. Once someone is off Bridge District property, responsibility is transferred to another entity.

In cases of actual interventions or suicides, Bridge Patrol officers file incident reports in addition to logbook notations. When an intervention is in progress, ironworkers on the bridge are alerted if they're on duty (they work 7
A.M.
to 3
P.M.
Monday to Friday). They're the only people authorized by the Bridge District to go over the rail and engage in what are referred to as “snatch and grab rescues” because they're wearing safety harnesses. The first officer on the scene is in charge and decides whether ironworkers will be involved. In worst-case situations where someone jumps during an intervention, debriefings are conducted and workers have access to an employee assistance program for posttraumatic stress disorder counseling.

Intervening in the lives of people who are suicidal can be dramatic, which is why Eve Meyer refers to suicide prevention as “opera without the music.” It's filled with tragedy and personalities that start out small yet end up casting large shadows. She says,

I could tell you dozens of stories, stories of people who are just like you, whoever you are. Male or female, young or old, rich or poor. Someone who is married with children, successful professionally, looked up to by others, or someone who is seemingly alone, without a supportive family or close friends, whose premature death nevertheless echoes throughout a community. The thing is, every suicide cuts short a life unnecessarily. As great as anyone's emotional pain may be, there are other options besides suicide. Call us and give us a chance to help you find them.

The common belief among the general public is that when someone picks up one of the thirteen specially-marked crisis phones on the Golden Gate Bridge, he or she is connected immediately to a suicide prevention counselor, most likely at San Francisco Suicide Prevention. Even some Bridge District officials believe this. In minutes from the district's January 27, 2005, meeting, board member Janet Reilly, a bridge barrier supporter, asked how many times the crisis telephones on the bridge are used. Kary Witt, the bridge's general manager, replied that four to five calls are made per year by suicidal individuals, and that the calls are routed to San Francisco Suicide Prevention. He was mistaken. In fact, Meyer says that her agency hasn't received a single bridge call since 1994. That's the year that calls started being answered by a police dispatcher—if they're answered at all. There are numerous photos on the Internet of “Out of Order” signs on Golden Gate Bridge phones. Salt air corrodes phone lines, and replacing them is costly and time consuming. People pose next to the phones for photographs, and sometimes pick up the receiver pretending to be suicidal, but they're seeking a memento, something to remember a walk on the world's deadliest span, rather than help.

Dr. Paul Linde is a psychiatrist in the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital, where many potential Golden Gate Bridge jumpers are taken by police. He starts his book,
Danger to Self
, by saying, “I love my job when I'm not there.” He explains that while the work is intellectually and emotionally demanding, when he's not there he has “a decent shot at separating out my job's trauma and drama from the rest of my life. But in my workplace, there's no place to hide.” It's another way of saying that dealing with people who have persistent, severe, and complex mental illnesses—illnesses that often lead them to attempt suicide—is analogous to the intense theatrics of opera. The only thing that's missing is the music.

One important aspect to explore is the ambivalence that's behind every expression of suicidal intent. After all, it's unlikely that persons who are 100 percent committed to die will call a hotline or disclose much information to a psychiatrist. Often, they don't want to be talked out of it, nor do they want anyone to interfere. They just act.

Dr. David Jobes is a clinical psychologist who has treated hundreds of suicidal patients, written books on suicide prevention, and lectured around the country on the subject. One question he suggests that all mental health professionals ask of anyone who's suicidal is, “When you think of suicide, does it scare you or comfort you?” As hard as is it for most people to believe, the thought of suicide is comforting to individuals who are trapped in their own version of hell. It's a coping strategy to employ if their pain becomes too great. The suicidal person's perception of the world is so narrowed by his or her suffering that nothing else matters. It's analogous to getting your finger caught in a closing door. At that moment, your whole world narrows down to the finger and the door. You don't think about anything else. In the same way, people who are experiencing mental or emotional pain aren't likely to give up the thought of suicide. It's ever present in their mind. What counselors do is acknowledge that suicide is an option, which is important in building trust, then work to expand the person's perspective. They talk about loved ones who will be left behind, other options to deal with distress, the potential lessening of the person's pain over time, and the possibility that suicide would be a mistake. Clients and patients continue to maintain the freedom to make their own decisions, including the decision to take their life. The goal of helpers is to push suicide farther down the list of options, to convince someone that suicide isn't the only solution left.

In their article, “What Would You Say to the Person on the Roof?” psychologists Haim Omer and Avshalom C. Elitzur describe ways to put a suicidal person's pain in perspective: “In killing the nineteen-year-old Ron, you will also be killing the twenty-year-old Ron and the thirty-year-old Ron and the forty-year-old Ron. You will be killing also the Ron that will perhaps be a father and a grandfather. How can you choose for these other Rons, for a Ron that will be stronger and more mature? How can you choose for the Ron that you could become, but to whom you refuse to give a chance?”

In her memoir
An Unquiet Mind
, Kay Redfield Jamison describes what it's like to live with manic depression, a term she prefers to bipolar disorder. She has suffered from it since early adulthood.

When you're high, it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible.… But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind.

Jamison, a tenured professor of psychology who has written a number of books, including
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
, contemplated several methods of suicide before overdosing and surviving. She says that even factors that are considered buffers against suicide—love, success, friendship—aren't always enough. “Others imply that they know what it's like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone,” she writes. “But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable.… You know and [others] know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding, and no reassurance is ever enough.”

According to one attempt survivor,

In the midst of a dark period or deep depression, the process is so internal that the outside world fades and becomes less important and, in some respects, is not as real as what is going on inside a person's own head.… It is hard for someone else to understand how hard that can be and how dark some periods can be, or that untreated depression can be so deep. It also is hard for someone else to understand how peaceful it can feel to make a decision to end it and feel it is the right decision even though the world would scream that it is not the right decision.

The challenge for caregivers is that a moment of desperation can lead to a quick, impulsive, and fatal decision. “Once you've jumped over the four-foot railing of the Golden Gate Bridge and are hurtling downward,” Paul Linde writes, “there's no turning back.” In addition—and most importantly—suicide never ends the pain. It only transfers it to the people who love you. They carry it with them and now join the ranks of grief-stricken souls who are at high risk for suicide themselves.

“I know a hundred ways to die,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay in a poem of the same name,

I've often thought I'd try one;

Lie down beneath a motor truck

Some day when standing by one.

Or throw myself from off a bridge—

Except such things must be

So hard upon the scavengers

And men that clean the sea.”

The Golden Gate Bridge facilitates suicides the same way that a blind curve facilitates auto accidents. While it might be hoped that everyone drives cautiously, as a society we recognize that some individuals are reckless. That a person may approach the curve too fast or slightly drunk doesn't excuse those in charge of the roads from telling people of the danger or fixing the problem. With the curve, flashing lights and warning signs are put up before the road opens, or at the latest after only one or two incidents, to signal drivers to slow down. In addition, guardrails are erected to keep cars from going off the road. No one complains that the signs or guardrails detract from the view because safety is considered more important. It's different with the Golden Gate Bridge. There's no hue and cry over the fatalities. No effort is made to stop the bloodshed. No one holds the people in charge accountable. Instead, the victims are blamed as if they're the ones who are solely responsible for their deaths.