"Golden Gate Bridge looks to safety net to reduce suicides" by Carol Pogash | New York Times March 27, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — Tourists who lean against the wind as they cross the Golden Gate Bridge may miss the slow-moving woman without a purse or the solo man without a camera or running shoes.
They are right; never gave it a thought when I was there. Then again, I was an entirely different person then.
Last year was a record: Forty-six people plunged to their deaths from the majestic orange bridge. Bridge workers stopped 118 others. That is a suicide or an attempt almost every other day at what is the most popular suicide spot in the nation, and among the most popular in the world.
Related: Golden Memories
Unlike the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Golden Gate lacks a suicide barrier.
For 60 years, the directors of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, reflecting the live-and-let-live ethos that animates this city, never agreed to build a barrier. Now, with the numbers of suicides rising — the country has more annually than traffic fatalities — and the ages of those jumping here declining, they are moving forward.
As early as late May, the directors are expected to reverse longstanding policy and vote in favor of using toll money in addition to federal and state funds for a suicide barrier. Tolls pay for bridge maintenance and subsidize bus and ferry services.
The plan calls for a $66 million stainless-steel net system 20 feet below the sidewalk. Over the years, much concern has been expressed about marring the bridge’s beauty; the barrier will be invisible from most angles. Many critics continue to assert that suicidal people will always find another way. Experts who have appeared before the board explained that the suicidal impulse is typically fleeting.
Must be a tough thing to conclude to do -- except for a Muslim, right?
According to certain sectors of my nation they ain't making it to heaven anyway, and some Muslim texts have me hanging out on a level of Hell.
Denis J. Mulligan, general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge district who has championed the barrier, recognizes the public’s ambivalence.
I was until now.
“Some of my friends say, ‘It’s great,’ ” Mulligan said. “Others say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ”
State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said, “A lot of liberal people are not educated around this issue.” They support affirmative action and gay rights, he said, but when he mentions a suicide barrier, they say, “What? But I love the bridge.” Ammiano, angered that the bridge board on which he once served has moved so slowly as people continue to die, called the bridge “a public health hazard.”
I can't argue with that.
Eve R. Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, said the popular argument was based on ignorance. “Scientific evidence says a barrier reduces suicides, because thoughts of suicide are transient,” she said. For years, she said, when she raised the issue of a barrier before the board, she was shunned.
Actually, it is what most argument is based on, popular or not. Maybe that comes across as arrogant, but it is true. I know what I know, and what I don't know I admit.
Dr. Mel Blaustein, medical director of psychiatry at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco and an early proponent of a barrier, said, “Young people think the bridge is a perfect place to go.”
Now that is saddening and frightening to read, and I want to know if there are any prescription pharmaceutical connections. Unless I'm being too ignorant for you.
People see jumping off the bridge as an easy way to die, he said. “There is a misconception that it’s painless.”
There is probably only one easy way, and that is during sound sleep, but who knows? Find out when we get there, if we do, I guess.
Those who jump plummet 220 feet and typically suffer rib collapse on impact, lacerating lungs and other internal organs, said Ken Holmes, the retired Marin County coroner who saw so many bodies of bridge suicides that he became a major crusader for a barrier. He said they died of internal bleeding or drowning.
Blaustein said, “The most common myth to explode is that people will go elsewhere.”
In a 1978 study, “Where Are They Now?” Richard H. Seiden, a former professor at the University of California Berkeley, School of Public Health, looked at the question of whether someone prevented from committing suicide in one place would go somewhere else. He studied people who had attempted suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge from 1937 to 1971 and found that more than 90 percent were still alive in 1978.
Then why are so many dying now?
Mulligan says he believes that the board “has become more informed” and that the stories parents tell about the loss of their children have made a difference.
The only time it does not is when the parents are Palestinian.
Every year, there are more parents. Suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge are trending younger.
Until recently, the largest group of Golden Gate Bridge suicides was ages 35 to 45, said Capt. Lisa Locati of the Golden Gate Bridge, who oversees bridge security. “Now, it’s 20- to 30-year-olds,” she said.
On Sept. 20, Kyle Gamboa, 18, of Fair Oaks, Calif., skipped school. The funny, confident, 5-foot-6 captain of his basketball team had repeatedly watched the trailer for “The Bridge,” a documentary about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge. He got into his truck, stopped at McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin with bacon, and drove the 110 miles to the bridge.
He turned on his truck’s emergency lights, got out and jumped, yelling “Yahoo!” on the way down.
At the last board meeting, Kyle’s father, Manuel Gamboa Jr., took off his New York Giants baseball cap and positioned his son’s school picture to face board members as he had done many times before. “You already heard my story,” he said. Since November, Gamboa has driven to the Golden Gate Bridge district building, next to the bridge, to speak at every board meeting.
Gamboa still cannot read Kyle’s suicide note, which said: “I’m happy. I thought this was a good place to end.”
“He wouldn’t have died that day if there had been something there,” Gamboa said in an interview.
“The bridge is a sieve in the mental health world,” said Holmes, the retired Marin County coroner. “Anyone can fall through during a momentary crisis.”
In 1995, when the number of bridge suicides approached 1,000 and a radio disc jockey offered a case of Snapple to the family of the 1,000th jumper, Holmes, then assistant coroner, contacted the radio station and persuaded local newspapers to stop reporting totals because he did not want to encourage more suicides. He came to believe that reporting annual — but not total — suicide numbers was important.
When he retired and the Marin County coroner’s office quit tracking annual bridge suicides, Holmes and other members of the Bridge Rail Foundation, an advocacy group that publicizes annual bridge statistics and encourages a growing number of bereaved parents to tell their stories, did their own annual compilations. Since the bridge was built in 1937, they count 1,600 suicides.
During one 24-hour period last July, there were four, Locati said.
On the day in early March when a photographer for The New York Times was taking pictures, the body of a 30-year-old physician with bipolar disorder, the second suicide of the week, was removed. Five others were stopped that week, Locati said.
I think my question has been somewhat answered. That's why the jumpers are getting younger. It's the meds.
The bridge district trains patrol officers, painters, and ironworkers how to spot, engage, and restrain despondent people on the bridge. The district offers a support program for anyone affected by the suicides.
While motorists still yell, “Jump!” and “Go, dude!” at suicidal people, the political climate is shifting. “The Final Leap,” a scholarly book by John Bateson, published in 2012, was given to all board members. This month, local newspapers published editorials saying it was time to save lives.
“There is a momentum,” Mulligan said. “Everyone wants to make this happen.”
The keystone, he said, was a clause added to the 2012 federal transportation bill authorizing funds for the “installation of safety barriers and nets on bridges,” the work of Senator Barbara Boxer, who served on the bridge board, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader.
Bereaved parents continue to tell their stories.
The 19-member bridge board, once all male, now has seven women. “That makes a difference,” said Judy Arnold, a board member. She hears the parents’ stories, she said, “And you think, ‘That could be my baby.’”
James C. Eddie, the board president who in 2008 was the sole vote against the net barrier, said in an interview that he now favored it and supported spending some toll money to pay for it. Eddie said he was touched by the family “that is reminding us every meeting that they lost their son.”
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I'd say it might be because of PTSD or the wars, but....
"Suicidal tendencies seen before military enlistment; High risk linked to long history of impulsive anger" by Benedict Carey | New York Times March 04, 2014
NEW YORK — Amid growing alarm at the rate of suicide among members of the military and confusion about possible causes, researchers reported Monday that most of the Army’s enlisted men and women with suicidal tendencies had them before they enlisted and that those at highest risk of making an attempt often had a long history of impulsive anger.
OMG!
Related: Globe Taps Into My Anger
I have to stop reading the Globe.
The findings were contained in three papers posted online Monday by the journal JAMA Psychiatry, including research done at Harvard University.
The studies found that about one in 10 soldiers qualified for a diagnosis of “intermittent explosive disorder,” as it is known to psychiatrists, more than five times the rate found in the general population.
This impulsive pattern, in combination with mood disorders and the stresses of deployment, increased the likelihood of acting on suicidal urges.
The new papers bring together five years of work by a coalition of academic, government, and military researchers, investigating hundreds of suicides and surveying thousands of active soldiers in anonymous questionnaires.
The effort began in 2008, after the suicide rate among active soldiers rose above the civilian rate among young healthy adults for the first time. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have relied on an all-volunteer Army, not a draft as in previous wars. And many of today’s enlisted men and women have deployed two, three, sometimes four times.
The new reports provide the first glimpse at how changes in the makeup of the fighting force and the increased demands of service have affected the suicide rate. The annual soldier suicide rate more than doubled between 2004 and 2009, to over 23 per 100,000. In that period, 569 soldier deaths were ruled suicides. Since then, the rate has begun to fall back toward 20 per 100,000, the civilian rate in the same age group.
That's a LIE!
Related: Slow Saturday Special: Going AWOL
I suppose it's true when you change the metrics.
********************
Dr. David Brent, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the research, [said it] strongly suggest that “the baggage people bring with them and often don’t disclose in order to get into armed services presumably interacts with the stresses of deployment” to increase vulnerability to suicide.
This Orwellian stuff is enough to make you want to kill yourself.
The three reports do not settle whether accession waivers, which relax standards for new soldiers and which the Army has used to shore up its ranks, increased the force’s vulnerability to suicide.
One study, an investigation of suicides and accidental deaths led by Michael Schoenbaum of the National Institute of Mental Health, found a host of risk factors many have suspected: demotions, a lower rank, and previous deployment among them. But looser standards for enlistment were not correlated with increased suicides.
Overall, the three reports sketch a portrait of suicide risk that in many respects is like the civilian one....
I'm so despondent over imagery, illusion, and all the other wonderful mind-manipulating pictures the propaganda pre$$ likes to paint. Sorry.
The biggest difference between soldiers and young adults in the civilian population was in impulsive anger....
Mine isn't impulsive, it's regular and it builds until I put the Globe aside for the morning.
Some experts suggested that the services could screen people after enlistment, to identify those who might be offered additional support.
“A small minority of soldiers are responsible for a disproportionate amount of suicidal behavior,” wrote Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, of the National Center for PTSD, in an editorial accompanying the reports. “Better identification of and intervention with the cohort are likely to have the best payoff.”
Think about that for a moment. A small minority responsible for a disproportionate amount, huh? I wonder how many times they are committing suicide each. I mean, can only do it once, right?
These experts also said that the military could invest in courses that shore up mental toughness servicewide as a preventive measure.
WTF?
More bullying the answer?
--more--"
Time to jump.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
You can still have photographs to look at when you buy a printed paper.
"1,892 VETERAN SUICIDES -- Volunteers, including Air Force veteran Linda Stanley of San Diego, placed 1,892 flags on the National Mall in Washington Thursday for each veteran who has died by suicide since Jan. 1. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America group was trying to raise awareness and support legislation aimed at helping veterans (Boston Globe March 28 2014)."
Good luck with that.
(Blog editor's own private vigil)
