Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
This past week a statistic caught my eye that I found exceptionally profound. It had to do with suicide attempts made by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Perhaps the stat was made more meaningful by my having crossed the Golden Gate a few times when my son and daughter were living out there a few years ago. In part, the statistic was striking because my brother, a Ph.D. psychologist, and I once intended to write a book about suicide, tentatively titled To Heal Broken Wings. We?d each known a few people close to us who took their own lives, or attempted it.
That was near 30 years ago and, sadly, over the course of a lifetime the list has gotten longer.
So what was the stat that so struck me? It was not the quantity of people who have leapt to their death from that bridge, nearly one every 16 days. Rather, it was this. All 29 people who survived their suicide attempts off San Francisco?s Golden Gate Bridge have said they regretted their decision as soon as they jumped.
That?s a mind-blowing statement. Each and every one who survived was immediately regretting their decision to leap to their deaths.
A few days passed before I decided I wished to write about it. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the trigger article, though Google quickly helped me find a few other stories that re-affirmed that original account.
The first was titled The Jumpers, by Steve Taylor, Ph.D. The Jumpers opens by introducing us to a Ken Baldwin who had struggled with depression much of his life. Taylor shares details of what brought him to this point, then segues into a several details about suicides on the Golden Gate.
From the beginning there have been 20 suicides a year at the bridge, he writes. He goes on to say, ?Every jumper has a 98% chance of success, a much higher percentage than for hanging, a drug overdose, or shooting. The bridge is 225 feet high, and after a four second fall, jumpers hit the water at a speed of 75 mph, with a force equivalent to a lorry crashing into a wall.?
The moment Ken Baldwin let go of the railing he immediately thought, ?What am I doing? This was the worst thing I could do in my life.? He instantly thought of his wife and daughter and didn?t want to die.
He recalls realizing that everything he thought was unfixable was totally fixable ? except for having just jumped.
The second article Google found for me had a slightly different angle. Instead of being about people who survived after attempting to jump to their deaths, this one was about people who intended to jump but were stopped by police.
This article was by Stacey Freedenthal, Ph.D., LCSW. and was titled Where Are They Now?: The Fate of Suicide Attempt Survivors. What Dr. Freedenthal found was that of 515 persons who intended to jump from the bridge and were stopped, only 7% went on to actually kill themselves at some point later in life. ?What Dr. Seiden found is a remarkable testament to the fact that a suicidal crisis is often ? very often ? temporary.?
Dr. Freedenthal then cites studies in Sweden and Finland, and a review of 177 other studies that showed similar findings.
One of the reasons I find this topic important is because it dovetails with another issue that I am concerned about, the legalization of physician-assisted dying. (Often referred to as doctor-assisted suicide.) I have written about this topic a number of times since the early 90s after doing a series of articles for a seniors publication on ethical issues in terminal health care.
The editor who handed me the assignment stated that I had to write four articles as a journalist before writing the fifth in which I could lay out my own conclusions. I found it to be a remarkably rewarding experience as I interviewed ethicists, oncologists, nurses and proponents (a member of the Hemlock Society, for example.)
The final article in the series was titled The Pros and Cons of Physician Assisted Suicide. In that article I began by noting the four reasons it seemed logical to legalize assisted dying. (Mercy argument, patient?s right to self-determination, economics and the reality that people are already doing it.)
But in my readings and in online forums, I discovered a range of concerns and red flags that ought to be considered. One of these red flags was this:
Many, if not most, people have wished they could die rather than face some difficult circumstance in their lives. Doctors who are given authority to grant this wish may not always recognize that the real problem is a treatable depression rather than the need to fulfill a patient?s death wish.
In a General Debate Forum on America Online someone shared this perspective:
?I know many individuals with significant disabilities: quadriplegia, post-polio survivors, persons with MS, etc. A number of them have tried committing suicide in the past and are now thankful that a mechanism wasn?t in place that would have assured their death, because they got over whatever was bothering them at the time and are happy with life again.?
As I read the stories of people who attempted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. I could not help but connect it again to this argument against legalization of assisted suicide.
Currently there is a lot of money being invested in legalization. It is being debated in numerous states now including New Mexico, Nevada, Maine, Maryland and elsewhere. I would urge caution.
FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC
Busting the Myths About SuicideCurrent Events Related to Physician Assisted SuicideMaking the Final Choice: Should Physician Assisted Dying Be Legalized
Disclaimer: The author is not a psychologist. I am writing as a journalist and as one who has read extensively on these matters over the course of a lifetime.
Thank you for reading. This is an important topic and I believe it will be debated for years to come. Make time to get informed.
