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The US government is going to do literally everything it can other than provide universal Healthcare until the country collapses.
Wait you're telling me this isn't what they meant by safety nets??
The physical, not social kind. "We'll catch you when you fall... this is not a metaphor."
I'm pretty sure California is in the process of implementing its own state-funded healthcare system.
It's the way to do it, just like with legalizing drugs.
For real. It would be interesting to see the average financial depth of the people who attempt suicide in the US.
This reminds me of the time San Francisco decided to do something about it's human-feces-in-the-BART-escalator-wells problem, not by making public restrooms available to unsheltered folk, but building stupid awnings to keep people from pooping inside. The awnings cost more than the toilets would have and people just pooped on the sidewalks instead. ℹ️🫶🌉😀
Curious since I'm not familiar, how do the awnings prevent this? I went to SF a few years ago and there was a giant pile of human shit every 4 blocks so I'm not too surprised.
They basically close off the street level entrance when the transit isn't running. The escalators used to be open at the top and closed at the bottom during off hours, making a lovely little private pooping tunnel. The city budget people didn't GAF about the bio hazard or human dignity issues, they just didn't like that all the excrement kept breaking the escalators.
Old article from before they implemented them (the article mentions the budget proposal being $4 million, it's turned into $64 million and counting).
Friedenbach balked at the canopy proposal. “I find it interesting that they’re spending this much money on canopies when they could be using it to keep their bathrooms open.” More so, the money could be used for keeping the high-traffic drop-in centers operational. A few years back, San Francisco, under former-mayor Gavin Newsom’s authority, sought to cut over a million dollars in funding for many of the city’s highest-traffic drop-in centers. The Coalition for Homelessness wouldn’t stand for it. “We’d already seen almost half of the centers close,” Friedenbach recalled, “so we figured out how many pounds of feces the public facilities kept off the street.” Friedenbach and company estimated that the cost of cutting back or getting rid of drop-in centers altogether would be over 58,000 pounds of human feces on the streets of San Francisco.
[...]
Regarding the four million dollars spent on the canopy proposal, Friedenbach said, “You could capture a large amount of feces [with bathrooms], instead of the one shit a night you might be staving off with this.”
This guy Friedenbach sounds like he knows his shit.
Reminds me of that Bojack Horseman poem.
"But this is it, the deed is done silence drowns the sound. Before I leaped I should've seen the view from halfway down.
I really should’ve thought about the view from halfway down. I wish I could've known about the view from halfway down—"
Love the NIMBY ass “we don’t want effective barriers to keep people from jumping because then we cant see the view, so put in an invisible torture device that will horribly maim and punish people already so far gone they’ve decided to end it” approach. Really sums up San Francisco. Why don’t they just install a fucking Suicide Booth at each end of the bridge. They clearly aren’t after stopping attempts, they just don’t want to look at it. Easier to find a corpse in the human fishing net 20 feet down than trolling the bay.
Exactly. I'm sorry for their view, which is an undeniably beautiful view, isn't as nice and I'm sorry that the historic bridge is less attractive now, but this is going to stop people from dying for fuck's sake!
We make fun of China for installing similar nets on their buildings. Maybe we can consider some time actually doing something about the cause of suicide rather than just stopping the action. Healthcare, especially mental healthcare, poverty, housing. But no, just nets.
Ok, I feel dark for making this meme.
I for one, love it. Nice work. The subject is uncomfortable, but this is absolutely a valid criticism of the system and the outcome in this case.
The fact that you used a meme based on a pawn shop - an institution that tends to take advantage of people on hard times - makes this dark and pithy. The only thing more fitting would be a payday loan center, but thankfully that hasn't made it to reality TV just yet.
But golden gate doesn't have anything inherent that pushes people to commit suicide. I feel like it's wasted money if the only thing this means is that this will happen somewhere else, what's the point then? Wouldn't it be spent better on mental healthcare for those who need it the most?
Edit 0: (I'm not super angry that they did install the nets, sure why not, it's not that expensive anyways, but I don't really feel like it solves the real issue. I'm mostly talking from my opinions and I don't have that many facts on this topic, maybe tackling suicide hot-spots does indeed reduce the statistic, I sincerely hope so but I doubt it)
Edit 1: After reading the article https://archive.is/Uuyx3 suggested by @Chetzemoka@startrek.website I feel like I was wrong in my initial assessment. Indeed it looks like there is a category of impulsive suicide that might be avoided with these barriers. I thank everyone who is contributing solid arguments to this difficult conversation. Despite the disagreements I see on the comments I believe we are all united in the feeling that this is a painful tragedy that we don't want to be part of this world
But golden gate doesn't have anything inherent that pushes people to commit suicide.
Don't be so sure about that. Check out some of this research.
Believe it or not, reducing access to lethal means actually reduces the number of deaths by suicide, and we have robust data to back this up.
"Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/
We ALSO need to improve people's material conditions and provide better mental health care. But even in societies with strong social safety nets, people still die by suicide. Reducing access to lethal means will reduce deaths, giving people time and opportunity to access any social safety net that exists.
There's one particularly fascinating case study out of Washington state:
"Running perpendicular to the Ellington Bridge, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below - about 125 feet - it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.
After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan...had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.
Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for."
And you know why twice as many people jumped off the Ellington vs. the Taft bridge in the first place? Because the railings on the Taft were slightly higher and therefore harder to scale.
I don't know if this article is paywalled or how to fix that, but it also contains details of a specific study conducted on people who intended to, but didn't jump off the Golden Gate bridge specifically. The absurdity of how minor an obstacle was required to prevent their deaths is amazing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html
“Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts.”
I am one of those nine. It is absolutely true. As you are dying, you realize what a mistake you're making. I'm glad I survived.
Woops, looks like I'm wrong in my comment!
Thank you so much for sharing the NY article, I still need to read it more times and take notes! For other people interested, it can be read at https://archive.is/Uuyx3. I definitely wasn't aware of this impulsive behavior when it came to suicide and the low rate of re-attempt that follows. I was surprised when I read the following:
In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes
I had a vision of suicide where it happened in a more nihilistic and complex way, or at least, something veery different from deciding you would kill yourself in 5~ minutes. I also wasn't aware that 2000 people had died at the golden gate, it does indeed sound like many of these cases are rushed or not premeditated. More importantly, the "Ellington barrier" example is a solid argument to install such barriers
I encourage others interested on the topic to read the article!
People actually travel to San Fran specifically to jump off that bridge because it is iconic.
I appreciate your edit so much. More people should feel free to not only be educated with new info, but be confident in openly sharing the fact that they were and help spread that info forward. Learning stuff is awesome.
There is a pretty harrowing documentary about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently it happens so often that if you set up a camera, after long enough you will catch lots of people considering it and doing it.
I think it's called "The Bridge"? It was on YouTube when I watched it years ago, dunno if it's still there. Maybe someone else will find it. But heads up, it's not exactly a fun watch.
So, now you just need to jump from the net after it catches you? That does not seem like much of a barrier.
every barrier helps, most suicide attempts are impulse decisions. forcing people to jump 30 feet into a net before they can jump a lethal distance makes it that much harder to follow through.
100%.
Several people have jumped into them. Some have been rescued from there, but “a handful” had “jumped into the net and then jumped to their death,” Mulligan said.
He declined to say how many. It will take a year or two of data to fully understand the system’s effectiveness, he said.
In the decade beginning in 2011, bridge officials said, there were 335 confirmed suicides, or an average of 33.5 per year. In 2022, as the first nets were being strung, there were 22. Through October this year, as more nets have been added, there were 13.
“If we save 30 lives a year, and not 31, it’s worth it for those 30 people who we saved,” Mulligan said. “And that’s every year. To greatly reduce the number of people dying in the community is a worthy goal. And to achieve that is success.”
Think of the first fall as a "proof of concept". If after falling ~20 feet to a chain link fence, you still feel like dragging your injured self to the edge of the fence to finish the job, then it's highly unlikely anything will stop you from killing yourself. The fence is kind of a "try before you buy" thing.
Holy shit, 6m down onto inflexible steel mesh. For reference, a 5 meter diving platform is significantly higher than a normal American high dive. That would really fucking hurt. But it would save your life.
Might be intentional. If it was closer/less of a drop, it might just become "another handrail" where the "oh shit I don't want to do this" doesn't happen until after you jump off the net. By making it such a big drop, you increase the chances of that realization happening first, and if the net causes an injury, that might also stop the person from making it to the edge of the net and going over.
Basically, by making it a big drop it's become a bigger obstacle, which could increase effectiveness.
Well, there goes my vacation plans this year.