The Final Leap (26 page)

The second reason why there isn't a suicide barrier on the bridge—and the argument that produces the strongest emotions among opponents—is because it will impact bridge aesthetics. The Golden Gate Bridge is beautiful; people come from all over the world to see it. The view from the bridge is equally breathtaking. Why ruin it with a suicide barrier?

After Casey Brooks jumped, John Brooks vowed that other parents would be spared the pain he and his wife were enduring. The only way to do that, he decided, was to join others who had lost loved ones to the bridge and advocate strongly for a suicide barrier. He knew it wouldn't be easy, however. In an opinion piece that was printed in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Brooks wrote:

We Americans hate to be inconvenienced, hate needless expenses imposed on us, and abhor any limitations on our personal freedoms. But this is not a popularity contest. We would probably not have helmet laws, seat belts, airbags, gun laws, controls on dangerous substances, to name a few—if they were put up for a public vote. We need a suicide barrier because we are supposedly a civilized and compassionate society that cares about the safety of our fellow citizens. This is a moral imperative.

Brooks acknowledges the passion behind the argument. It's not easily dismissed. Still, “by making ‘the view' more important than saving lives,” he wrote, “the message we're sending is that a few lives lost every month is but a small price to pay to preserve ‘the view.' How do you defend that? Doesn't that make us look incredibly barbaric and at the very least shallow, selfish, and uncaring?”

Many people don't know that there actually is a barrier at the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's an eight-foot-high cyclone fence, 350 feet long, and has been there nearly thirty years. There's nothing pretty about it, but then it's not there for aesthetic purposes. It's there to protect people below, at Fort Baker, from being struck by debris tossed over the side. “We protect people from garbage,” offered Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, referring to this fence. “We just don't protect them from killing themselves.”

Some of the designs proposed in the past for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge would use flexible steel rods that are so thin they would be invisible from shore. You couldn't see them unless you were on the bridge, and if you were on the bridge they wouldn't block your view; they would just block someone from jumping.

A somewhat different design was used at the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto, Canada (also referred to as the Bloor Street Bridge because it connects Bloor Street with Danforth Avenue). Until 2003, this bridge was the second-deadliest suicide site in the world (after the Golden Gate Bridge), with nearly 500 fatal jumps. Then $4 million was spent on a “luminous veil” of stainless-steel rods constructed above the bridge's existing railing. Funds were allocated following the death of thirty-five-year-old Martin Kruze. Kruze jumped from the bridge after a man who was convicted of abusing him as a child received a lenient sentence in a well-publicized trial. Before he jumped, Kruze walked past tollfree phones that connected to the city's suicide hotline. The addition of a suicide barrier on the Bloor Street Bridge achieved the desired effect—the number of suicides dropped to zero and has stayed there. Of equal interest is the barrier's aesthetic beauty. Architect Dereck Revington envisioned that the 10,000 steel rods would create an open yet impenetrable wall and make the bridge look “strung like a Stradivarius.” His barrier received the Canadian national engineering award for design elegance. Many people thought that aesthetics were enhanced because of it. Today, the barrier is referred to as “lifesaving art.”

Lorrie Goldin is a clinician in the Bay Area. At one time she didn't have strong feelings one way or the other regarding a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. What caused her to become a strong advocate for one was when a colleague told her about a fourteen-year-old boy who lived in Marin County and took a bus to school everyday in San Francisco. One day after school the boy got off the bus near the bridge, walked out on the span, and put his leg up over the railing, intending to jump. A variety of things were troubling him, and death would end his pain. At the last instant he changed his mind, took another bus home, and told his mother. She sought help for him immediately. That was in 2005.

“He's fine now,” Goldin says, noting that in many instances “impulses pass, circumstances change, help is found, the balance toward affirming life over death shifts.” Goldin's own daughter was fourteen at the time—one reason why the story resonated so strongly with her.

Any lingering ambivalence I felt about the barrier evaporated. So much of the barriers to a barrier have to do with our failure to identify not only with the person who is suffering but with the hope that lies beyond the moment. A bridge barrier will not save every life, but it will buy precious moments that will save many lives.… Suicide is not a freak accident, but a real and preventable risk. Imagine if it were you or someone you loved was about to swing a leg up over the rail. You might find the money and the ability to get used to a slightly different fabulous view.”

The third and most-often cited reason against erecting a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge—and other bridges—is the mistaken belief that someone intent on suicide will go somewhere else to jump or, being thwarted, choose another lethal means. Opponents of a barrier use this argument as an alternative to appearing unsympathetic. They claim that if a barrier truly prevented suicides, they would be in favor of it. But if people really want to kill themselves, it's impossible to stop them, so why bother?

This belief in the inevitability of suicide is contradicted by the facts. For instance, it used to be that the most popular method of suicide in England was sticking one's head in the oven and turning on the gas. People died of asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. One psychologist referred to this as “the execution chamber in everyone's kitchen.” Poet Sylvia Plath took her life this way in 1963. After oil and natural gas deposits were discovered in the North Sea, however, the majority of English homes converted from coal gas, which has a high carbon monoxide content, to natural gas, which is cheaper and much less toxic. With the conversion, the number of suicides by gas dropped from an annual high of 2,368 in the 1950s and 1960s to a low of 11 in recent years. Moreover, the country's overall suicide rate decreased by 26 percent. Since then, the suicide rate in England has remained at the lower level despite periodic high unemployment, which is directly linked to suicide. When it was no longer possible to die by breathing oven fumes, people didn't resort to another means.

Similarly, when the Australian government banned automatic and semiautomatic guns in 1996 after thirty-five people were killed in a shooting rampage, the number of firearm suicides dropped in half and has stayed there, while the number of suicides by other means has not increased. In 2006, the Israeli Defense Force stopped letting soldiers take their weapons home with them on weekend leaves. The suicide rate dropped 40 percent almost overnight with no increase in firearm suicides on weekdays.

In 1978 Richard Seiden, a psychology professor at the University of California in Berkeley, published a study titled “Where Are They Now?” The study was focused “towards answering the important question, ‘Will a person who is prevented from suicide in one location inexorably tend to attempt and commit suicide elsewhere?' ” To find out, Seiden and a team of graduate students tracked what had happened to 515 people who had attempted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and were stopped. Using a list provided by the California Highway Patrol, and cross-checking it against death certificate records, Seiden found that 94 percent either were still alive twenty-five years later or had died by means other than suicide. Only 6 percent subsequently ended up taking their own lives.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Seiden told Scott Anderson, a
New York Times Magazine
reporter who wrote about Golden Gate Bridge suicides in 2008, “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 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.”

Seiden, now retired, told Anderson about a young man he interviewed who had decided to jump from a particular spot on one side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Somehow, by mistake, the man ended up on the other side of the bridge. Eventually he was nabbed by police because he couldn't bring himself to dart across six lanes of traffic—he was too afraid of being hit.

In 2006, three professors at the Harvard School of Public Health published a study regarding the public's belief in the inevitability of suicide. They surveyed nearly 3,000 adults across the country and asked them if they thought a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge would save lives. More than two-thirds of respondents said that most bridge jumpers would kill themselves another way, with 34 percent believing that
every single
jumper would have died by suicide regardless of whether the bridge had a barrier. The strongest predictor of this belief was owning a firearm. Forty-five percent of firearm owners believed that persons intent on dying would resort to any means available to kill themselves. The second strongest predictor was cigarette smoking;43 percent of smokers believed that a person who wanted to die wouldn't be stopped by a barrier.

“These findings,” wrote the authors, “suggest widespread and, at least among one-third of Americans, deeply held skepticism about the potential effectiveness of suicide prevention efforts, which rely on restricting access to highly lethal and commonly-used methods. It also may help explain why there has been little public demand to construct a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Obviously, the people who were surveyed hadn't heard of Richard Seiden's study. In addition, they probably didn't know that only three of the thirty-two people known to have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge have subsequently died by suicide. Most have chosen to live.

In 2008 the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a network of 150 independent crisis centers that collectively answer calls to America's two main suicide hotlines—800-273-TALK and 800-SUICIDE—issued a position paper in response to an increasing number of requests from transportation and bridge authorities who wanted to install bridge phones and signage with the Lifeline number rather than a safety barrier. Phones and signs are cheaper than barriers, and don't impact aesthetics. John Draper, a psychologist and the director of the Lifeline, drafted the paper. In addition to the “luminous veil” that was constructed at the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto, Draper noted a number of other instances where the addition of a suicide barrier on one bridge eliminated suicides from that location and didn't lead to increased suicides on neighboring bridges.

For example, from 1979 through 1985, twenty-four people died jumping off the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, DC. In 1986, an eight-foot-high anti-suicide fence was constructed. The fence was the result of three suicides in a ten-day period and the intense lobbying of Ben Read, former deputy secretary of state. Read's twenty-four-year-old daughter had died by jumping from the bridge. In addition, there were reports that one young woman had been thrown off the bridge while another had been held over the edge and told that she'd be dropped if she didn't submit to an attacker's sexual demands. Five years after a barrier was installed, only one person had jumped from the bridge. Furthermore, there was no increase in the number of suicides from the nearby Taft Bridge, which didn't have a barrier.

Another example is the Memorial Bridge located in Augusta, Maine. Between 1960 and 1983 there were fourteen suicides from the bridge; after a barrier was installed, the number of suicides dropped to zero. Two decades later, Dr. Andrew Pelletier, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that no other site in the area registered an increase in suicides after the barrier went up. Furthermore, there was an overall decrease in the number of suicides in the city. Pelletier concluded that the bridge barrier “was probably effective in lowering the overall suicide rate in Augusta.”

Even so, in 2004 the Augusta city council debated whether the barrier was still needed. The bridge no longer was a magnet for suicides, and it was due to be renovated. City council members voted 7 to 1 to retain the barrier. “Some see that fence as something ugly,” one council member told the local paper, “but I see it as something caring. The fence is a symbol that tells motorists and pedestrians that the capital city is concerned about the mentally ill who live here.”

Draper cited examples from around the world. In Bristol, England, a partial barrier was erected on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Over five years, the number of suicides from the bridge was cut in half, from eight to four. Researchers concluded that there would be even fewer suicides if a full barrier was in place. Moreover, they noted that there was no increase in jumps from other bridges. In Auckland, New Zealand, safety barriers were removed from the Grafton Bridge in 1996 after being in place sixty years. Over the six years following the removal there were fifteen bridge suicides. When the barriers were reinstalled in 2003, suicides from the bridge ended.

Closer to home, there were eighty suicides from the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena, California, from 1913 to 1936—so many that locals referred to it as the “Suicide Bridge.” The bridge is 150 feet above a water-carved canyon, and was especially popular as a suicide site following the Great Depression. After a barrier was installed, there was only one suicide from the bridge in the next thirty-six years.