Suicide Nets Going Up On Golden Gate Bridge

The Golden Gate Transportation District’s board of directors voted 14-1 in favor of anti-suicide nets that will be affixed 20 feet down and out to catch troubled chaps who officially have had enough.

Yep.  Nets to catch the jumpers.  Sounds a little half-baked and ineffective, doesn’t it?

You know kind of like inserting ejector buttons on train tracks. You know, sad broken-hearted man steps onto the tracks.  Takes a last swig of his bourbon.  Train comes.  Red-eyed man yells at the sky.  Engineer pulls the booming whistle and frantically waves his hand for the man to step aside.  Man holds his steely gaze upwards.  Train comes closer.  Engineer presses button.  Man soars fifteen feet into the air and out of trouble.  The impending suicide is averted. But of course where there’s a will there’s a way, right?  If not the tracks, if not the bridge, well there are many other ways.

Wait before I finish this thought, let’s think about these nets.  How incredibly ballsy would it be to jump into one of these things.  You know that will be every male’s thought in peering down into one of these things:

“Dude….do it.”

“You do it”.

Guy pretends to start climbing then stops.

“Pussy”.

“You’re a pussy.”

And worse, you know some dumbshits will actually do it.  Can’t you already see the news report? You know some jack-ass all twisted up in the net with a news helicopter flying around.  Him looking like he shit his pants while his buddies are quickly making their escape off the bridge.  It’s bound to happen.

And hell, maybe this will become another part of the BASE jumpers repertoire.  Perhaps the ‘N’ (for ‘nets’) will be the new addition.  So what…will it be BASEN jumpers now.  Or SABEN?  BEANS.  There you go.  Jumping BEANS.

Anyways, none of this is my point.  My point is questioning how effective these nets will be.

What is really interesting to me about this is that they most likely will be very effective.  Obviously effective in saving the lives of bridge jumpers, that’s not too hard to follow, but in saving the individual’s life, period.

I actually read a really good article on the subject in the New York Times several months back.  As it turns out the large majority of suicides are found to be impulsive, very much in the moment actions as opposed to….  Hold on….I will find a section of it….

Here:

For generations, the people of Britain heated their homes and fueled their stoves with coal gas. While plentiful and cheap, coal-derived gas could also be deadly; in its unburned form, it released very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve or a leak in a closed space could induce asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. This extreme toxicity also made it a preferred method of suicide. “Sticking one’s head in the oven” became so common in Britain that by the late 1950s it accounted for some 2,500 suicides a year, almost half the nation’s total.

Those numbers began dropping over the next decade as the British government embarked on a program to phase out coal gas in favor of the much cleaner natural gas. By the early 1970s, the amount of carbon monoxide running through domestic gas lines had been reduced to nearly zero. During those same years, Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third, and it has remained close to that reduced level ever since.

How can this be? After all, if the impulse to suicide is primarily rooted in mental illness and that illness goes untreated, how does merely closing off one means of self-destruction have any lasting effect? At least a partial answer is that many of those Britons who asphyxiated themselves did so impulsively. In a moment of deep despair or rage or sadness, they turned to what was easy and quick and deadly — “the execution chamber in everyone’s kitchen,” as one psychologist described it — and that instrument allowed little time for second thoughts. Remove it, and the process slowed down; it allowed time for the dark passion to pass.

Quite inadvertently, the British gas conversion proved that the incidence of suicide across an entire society could be radically reduced, upending the conventional wisdom about suicide in the process. Or rather it should have upended the conventional wisdom, for what is astonishing today is how little-known the British coal-gas story is even among mental-health professionals who deal with suicide. Last November, I attended a youth suicide-prevention conference in New Hampshire at which Catherine Barber, a member of the Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health, gave a PowerPoint presentation on creating physical barriers to suicide — or “means restriction,” in public-health parlance — to a large group of mental-health officials and school counselors. While giving a brief history of the approach, she came to several slides describing the British gas-conversion phenomenon and paused.

And then it goes on to talk about bridges and studies w/ bridge jumpers elsewhere and measures taken there blah, blah, blah. Football is on right now and this is starting to feel like school, so I’m not going to clean any of this up.  So there.

Nets are going up and they will help believe it or not.

BN

Article grade: Incomplete.