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The fatal attraction of 'suicide magnets'
by Oakland Ross, thestar.com
January 10, 2010
Everyone who knew her believed Olivia Crowther was doing fine during those early days of Britain's summer – a little moody, perhaps, a bit preoccupied but, on the whole, fine. A graduate in English literature from University of Sussex, the slim, young woman with long black hair shared an East London flat with a friend. She had embarked on a career in magazine publishing.
All of this was true as of June 23, 2008.
Two days later – in the early morning hours of June 25 – U.S. Coast Guard sailors found the woman's body floating in the chill Pacific waters that surge and subside beneath San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, an ocean and a continent removed from her Whitechapel home. She was 23 years old.
Crowther's death was ruled a probable suicide. Her name joined the long and growing list of troubled souls whose final view of Earth includes the sinewy green hills of the San Francisco Peninsula and the hurtling blue surface of San Francisco Bay.
Shortly after their daughter's death, Crowther's parents checked her recent computer activity and discovered she had been researching online suicide sites and seeking information about inexpensive plane tickets to California, home of the famous orange suspension bridge – the world's foremost attraction for people who want to die.
Golden Gate Bridge and other such sites are known as "suicide magnets," physical structures that seem to exert a seductive and sometimes fatal power on certain tormented individuals. Bridge authorities in San Francisco finally are inching their way toward building a protective barrier that would save people trying to leap to their deaths from Golden Gate Bridge but they have not fully committed themselves yet. It's an open question whether they ever will.
Such barriers already exist at similar structures in other parts of the world, including Toronto's Bloor Street viaduct over the Don Valley.
"Suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge are contagious," said Michael McCamus, former executive director of the Toronto-based Family Association for Mental Health Everywhere. They are also frequent – so frequent, in fact, that some San Francisco residents used to place bets on the date of the next deadly fall. According to Eve Meyer, who heads a crisis line called San Francisco Suicide Prevention, about 30 corpses are found floating beneath the Golden Gate Bridge each year. Roughly five additional bodies drift out to sea annually, never to be recovered. Since the California bridge's completion in 1937, more than 1,200 people have leapt from the span's orange-painted steel surface to plummet 75 metres before hitting the water's unforgiving surface at about 140 km/h. The journey takes four seconds.
For many years, the Golden Gate Bridge's eerie hold on the darker side of the North American psyche was challenged only by Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct, better known as the Bloor Street viaduct, long the perennial also-ran in the list of the continent's deadliest suicide sites. The city's viaduct is no longer on that list. "We haven't had any suicides there since the installation of the Luminous Veil," said James Edwards, regional coroner for Toronto East. He is referring to the now-familiar barrier of taut steel rods installed in 2003 on both sides of the bridge that spans the Don Valley. Since then, it has frustrated anyone who otherwise might have thrown himself or herself over the side, as more than 400 individuals have done since the viaduct was completed in 1918.
The question is: does the Luminous Veil also stop people from going elsewhere to hurl themselves from some other lofty perch? Does it have any effect on thwarted jumpers who could, instead, step in front of a subway train, for example, or take an overdose of pills or put a gun to their head? The answer is: nobody really knows.
Each year, some 200 to 300 people in Toronto kill themselves, a total that easily can swing back and forth by 30 to 50 fatalities annually for no apparent reason. This volatility makes it difficult to determine the Luminous Veil's impact on suicides in Toronto during the past six years.
In 1997, according to McCamus, 17 people leaped to their deaths from the viaduct, a toll that increased to 20 or so in each of the ensuing years, peaking during construction of the barrier itself. Then such suicides stopped.
Some opponents argue now, as they argued then, that the controversial barrier was a waste of $5.5 million. Yes, it might prevent people from jumping to their deaths from the viaduct, but what's to stop those bent on suicide from proceeding to the nearby Leaside Bridge, a 3-kilometre trip northeast that takes four minutes by car?
At least one depressed Torontonian, taxi driver Don Noble, 60, made this very journey in 2002 during construction of the Luminous Veil. He took one look at work on the viaduct then went to Leaside Bridge. Jumping to his death there, he fell 45.4 metres – a height more than 5 metres taller than the Bloor Street span.
The Ontario coroner's office does not break down suicide figures according to precise locale – deaths involving jumps are simply recorded as "falls from heights" no matter where they occur – so there is no easy way to determine whether would-be viaduct jumpers went to some other similarly lethal platform."I couldn't tell you anything about sites," said June Lindsell, a spokeswoman for the coroner's office. "We can't be that specific."
The more general statistics on falls from heights show such suicides substantially increased in the years before the Luminous Veil was constructed – from 48 in 2000 to 65 in 2002. But they have levelled off or even diminished since then, going from 56 in 2004 to 63 the following year, 62 in 2006 and a preliminary figure of 60 in 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Were it not for the barricade, the number of such suicides in recent years might well have been higher, but it is difficult to say so for sure.
Meanwhile, most academic literature on the subject makes this very case, and forcefully. The great majority of potential suicides who are drawn to a particular suicide magnet wind up not killing themselves at all – if only they can be prevented from jumping at their preferred spot.
"People in a suicide crisis aren't thinking properly," said Paul Links, who holds the Arthur Sommer Rotenberg chair in suicide studies at the University of Toronto. "They don't have a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C. They're usually focused on one idea."
Jumping from a great height tends to be a precarious and impulsive enterprise anyway, never mind the preparation that may be involved – a flight from London to San Francisco, in the case of Olivia Crowther.
The buildup to a fatal leap is apt to be slow and thoughtful, but the actual urge to jump – to really do it – seems to be the work of an instant.
Consider the sorrowful case of Toronto teenager Kenneth Au Yeung. At 12:20 p.m. on Dec. 11, 1997, motorist Chantelle Gobeil, then 25, was driving west on Danforth Ave. when she saw the 17-year-old student striding along the Bloor viaduct on his own, seeming to move with energy and purpose. The boy was in a torment of remorse. A student at St. Michael's Choir School, he had only that morning been called in to the principal's office and castigated by an off-duty police officer for his role in a prank involving potentially libellous remarks that mistakenly found their way into print in the school's yearbook, which he had helped edit. One moment on that bitter day, he was walking on the sidewalk, anguished but alive. The next moment, said Gobeil, the boy planted both hands on the concrete railing, vaulted over the side, and was gone.
"One thing we don't get is the almost spontaneous nature of the thing," said Paul Quinn, executive director of Toronto's Gerstein Centre, a crisis-intervention agency. "They're going by a bridge and they jump."
But what if they can be prevented from jumping?
In the late 1970s, University of California psychologist Richard Seiden tracked 515 thwarted jumpers at the Golden Gate, dating from the bridge's completion in 1937 until 1971. Only 6 per cent went on to kill themselves on another occasion, he found.
Another U.S. study compares suicide rates at two adjacent bridges in Washington, D.C. One of them, the Duke Ellington Bridge, had been a well-known magnet for suicides, while the other – the William Howard Taft Bridge – was not.
In 1986, authorities constructed a protective barrier on the Ellington bridge, preventing suicides there. Many expected a corresponding increase in jumpers at the Taft bridge but it didn't happen.
"There is a lot of folk wisdom that says people would just kill themselves elsewhere," said Meyer, from the San Francisco suicide emergency line. "The data very uniformly indicate they will not."
Well-known suicide magnets in the United Kingdom, including the Beachy Head cliffs in East Sussex and the Hornsey Lane Bridge in London, either of which would have served Olivia Crowther's desperate purpose far more conveniently than the Golden Gate Bridge. Yet they, evidently, weren't a fatal attraction for her.
For reasons that may have to do with physical setting, as well as historical and perhaps literary associations, the Bloor Street viaduct came to be perceived as such a magnet. "Some places do get this ethos," said Links at the U of T, "and certainly the Bloor Street viaduct was one."
Last October, the directors in charge of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge voted to construct a suicide barrier, a protective net beneath the structure at a projected cost of $50 million (U.S.). But they have not yet approved the funding, and they do not seem in any hurry to do so.
The proposed Golden Gate net is entangled in controversy, as was the Luminous Veil in Toronto. Historical preservationists oppose the net for aesthetic and heritage reasons, while harder-nosed opponents insist it just plain won't work. They use the argument, familiar to Torontonians, that jumpers simply will go elsewhere – because that's what common sense says they will do.
"It's like the sun," explained Meyer. "It comes up on one side of the city and goes down on the other side of the city, so common sense tells you the sun goes around the Earth."
Only it doesn't.
---------- Post added January 11th, 2010 at 07:57 AM ---------- Previous post was January 10th, 2010 at 08:19 PM ----------
I was so upset when I started this thread that I forgot to add my question it relation to this article. I know I'm hypersensitive but would this article like this trigger a lot of people? And if so should the media take for responibility in how they present suicide?
by Oakland Ross, thestar.com
January 10, 2010
Everyone who knew her believed Olivia Crowther was doing fine during those early days of Britain's summer – a little moody, perhaps, a bit preoccupied but, on the whole, fine. A graduate in English literature from University of Sussex, the slim, young woman with long black hair shared an East London flat with a friend. She had embarked on a career in magazine publishing.
All of this was true as of June 23, 2008.
Two days later – in the early morning hours of June 25 – U.S. Coast Guard sailors found the woman's body floating in the chill Pacific waters that surge and subside beneath San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, an ocean and a continent removed from her Whitechapel home. She was 23 years old.
Crowther's death was ruled a probable suicide. Her name joined the long and growing list of troubled souls whose final view of Earth includes the sinewy green hills of the San Francisco Peninsula and the hurtling blue surface of San Francisco Bay.
Shortly after their daughter's death, Crowther's parents checked her recent computer activity and discovered she had been researching online suicide sites and seeking information about inexpensive plane tickets to California, home of the famous orange suspension bridge – the world's foremost attraction for people who want to die.
Golden Gate Bridge and other such sites are known as "suicide magnets," physical structures that seem to exert a seductive and sometimes fatal power on certain tormented individuals. Bridge authorities in San Francisco finally are inching their way toward building a protective barrier that would save people trying to leap to their deaths from Golden Gate Bridge but they have not fully committed themselves yet. It's an open question whether they ever will.
Such barriers already exist at similar structures in other parts of the world, including Toronto's Bloor Street viaduct over the Don Valley.
"Suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge are contagious," said Michael McCamus, former executive director of the Toronto-based Family Association for Mental Health Everywhere. They are also frequent – so frequent, in fact, that some San Francisco residents used to place bets on the date of the next deadly fall. According to Eve Meyer, who heads a crisis line called San Francisco Suicide Prevention, about 30 corpses are found floating beneath the Golden Gate Bridge each year. Roughly five additional bodies drift out to sea annually, never to be recovered. Since the California bridge's completion in 1937, more than 1,200 people have leapt from the span's orange-painted steel surface to plummet 75 metres before hitting the water's unforgiving surface at about 140 km/h. The journey takes four seconds.
For many years, the Golden Gate Bridge's eerie hold on the darker side of the North American psyche was challenged only by Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct, better known as the Bloor Street viaduct, long the perennial also-ran in the list of the continent's deadliest suicide sites. The city's viaduct is no longer on that list. "We haven't had any suicides there since the installation of the Luminous Veil," said James Edwards, regional coroner for Toronto East. He is referring to the now-familiar barrier of taut steel rods installed in 2003 on both sides of the bridge that spans the Don Valley. Since then, it has frustrated anyone who otherwise might have thrown himself or herself over the side, as more than 400 individuals have done since the viaduct was completed in 1918.
The question is: does the Luminous Veil also stop people from going elsewhere to hurl themselves from some other lofty perch? Does it have any effect on thwarted jumpers who could, instead, step in front of a subway train, for example, or take an overdose of pills or put a gun to their head? The answer is: nobody really knows.
Each year, some 200 to 300 people in Toronto kill themselves, a total that easily can swing back and forth by 30 to 50 fatalities annually for no apparent reason. This volatility makes it difficult to determine the Luminous Veil's impact on suicides in Toronto during the past six years.
In 1997, according to McCamus, 17 people leaped to their deaths from the viaduct, a toll that increased to 20 or so in each of the ensuing years, peaking during construction of the barrier itself. Then such suicides stopped.
Some opponents argue now, as they argued then, that the controversial barrier was a waste of $5.5 million. Yes, it might prevent people from jumping to their deaths from the viaduct, but what's to stop those bent on suicide from proceeding to the nearby Leaside Bridge, a 3-kilometre trip northeast that takes four minutes by car?
At least one depressed Torontonian, taxi driver Don Noble, 60, made this very journey in 2002 during construction of the Luminous Veil. He took one look at work on the viaduct then went to Leaside Bridge. Jumping to his death there, he fell 45.4 metres – a height more than 5 metres taller than the Bloor Street span.
The Ontario coroner's office does not break down suicide figures according to precise locale – deaths involving jumps are simply recorded as "falls from heights" no matter where they occur – so there is no easy way to determine whether would-be viaduct jumpers went to some other similarly lethal platform."I couldn't tell you anything about sites," said June Lindsell, a spokeswoman for the coroner's office. "We can't be that specific."
The more general statistics on falls from heights show such suicides substantially increased in the years before the Luminous Veil was constructed – from 48 in 2000 to 65 in 2002. But they have levelled off or even diminished since then, going from 56 in 2004 to 63 the following year, 62 in 2006 and a preliminary figure of 60 in 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Were it not for the barricade, the number of such suicides in recent years might well have been higher, but it is difficult to say so for sure.
Meanwhile, most academic literature on the subject makes this very case, and forcefully. The great majority of potential suicides who are drawn to a particular suicide magnet wind up not killing themselves at all – if only they can be prevented from jumping at their preferred spot.
"People in a suicide crisis aren't thinking properly," said Paul Links, who holds the Arthur Sommer Rotenberg chair in suicide studies at the University of Toronto. "They don't have a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C. They're usually focused on one idea."
Jumping from a great height tends to be a precarious and impulsive enterprise anyway, never mind the preparation that may be involved – a flight from London to San Francisco, in the case of Olivia Crowther.
The buildup to a fatal leap is apt to be slow and thoughtful, but the actual urge to jump – to really do it – seems to be the work of an instant.
Consider the sorrowful case of Toronto teenager Kenneth Au Yeung. At 12:20 p.m. on Dec. 11, 1997, motorist Chantelle Gobeil, then 25, was driving west on Danforth Ave. when she saw the 17-year-old student striding along the Bloor viaduct on his own, seeming to move with energy and purpose. The boy was in a torment of remorse. A student at St. Michael's Choir School, he had only that morning been called in to the principal's office and castigated by an off-duty police officer for his role in a prank involving potentially libellous remarks that mistakenly found their way into print in the school's yearbook, which he had helped edit. One moment on that bitter day, he was walking on the sidewalk, anguished but alive. The next moment, said Gobeil, the boy planted both hands on the concrete railing, vaulted over the side, and was gone.
"One thing we don't get is the almost spontaneous nature of the thing," said Paul Quinn, executive director of Toronto's Gerstein Centre, a crisis-intervention agency. "They're going by a bridge and they jump."
But what if they can be prevented from jumping?
In the late 1970s, University of California psychologist Richard Seiden tracked 515 thwarted jumpers at the Golden Gate, dating from the bridge's completion in 1937 until 1971. Only 6 per cent went on to kill themselves on another occasion, he found.
Another U.S. study compares suicide rates at two adjacent bridges in Washington, D.C. One of them, the Duke Ellington Bridge, had been a well-known magnet for suicides, while the other – the William Howard Taft Bridge – was not.
In 1986, authorities constructed a protective barrier on the Ellington bridge, preventing suicides there. Many expected a corresponding increase in jumpers at the Taft bridge but it didn't happen.
"There is a lot of folk wisdom that says people would just kill themselves elsewhere," said Meyer, from the San Francisco suicide emergency line. "The data very uniformly indicate they will not."
Well-known suicide magnets in the United Kingdom, including the Beachy Head cliffs in East Sussex and the Hornsey Lane Bridge in London, either of which would have served Olivia Crowther's desperate purpose far more conveniently than the Golden Gate Bridge. Yet they, evidently, weren't a fatal attraction for her.
For reasons that may have to do with physical setting, as well as historical and perhaps literary associations, the Bloor Street viaduct came to be perceived as such a magnet. "Some places do get this ethos," said Links at the U of T, "and certainly the Bloor Street viaduct was one."
Last October, the directors in charge of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge voted to construct a suicide barrier, a protective net beneath the structure at a projected cost of $50 million (U.S.). But they have not yet approved the funding, and they do not seem in any hurry to do so.
The proposed Golden Gate net is entangled in controversy, as was the Luminous Veil in Toronto. Historical preservationists oppose the net for aesthetic and heritage reasons, while harder-nosed opponents insist it just plain won't work. They use the argument, familiar to Torontonians, that jumpers simply will go elsewhere – because that's what common sense says they will do.
"It's like the sun," explained Meyer. "It comes up on one side of the city and goes down on the other side of the city, so common sense tells you the sun goes around the Earth."
Only it doesn't.
---------- Post added January 11th, 2010 at 07:57 AM ---------- Previous post was January 10th, 2010 at 08:19 PM ----------
I was so upset when I started this thread that I forgot to add my question it relation to this article. I know I'm hypersensitive but would this article like this trigger a lot of people? And if so should the media take for responibility in how they present suicide?
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