The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge, “a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond.” The essay starts with an arresting story, as is often the case in New Yorker style, in which one of only twenty-six survivors of jumps or falls from the Golden Gate gets a second chance… to jump again. It goes on to discuss the romance of jumping from the bridge, as contrasted to its sister the Bay Bridge, to suicide from which is considered tacky.
“Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges.” The notoriety of the bridge inspires a peculiar pride in those in the Bay area, the article suggests. Even after an atrocious incident in which a jumper first threw his three-year-old daughter over the railing before followiing her down, a majority of citizens oppose a longstanding suggestion that the low railing be augmented by an anti-jumping barrier. Despite evidence that barriers have substantially reduced fatalities at other famous locales of high elevation, the idea of a barrier is opposed on grounds of aesthetics, cost, the facile and misguided attitude I might call ‘jumpers’ rights’, and the idea that ‘the jumpers will simply go elsewhere.’ Although this notion makes common sense, it is not true. A 1978 study followed up on 515 people who had been prevented from jumping from the bridge between 1937 and 1971; 94% were still alive or had died of causes other than suicide. For the thirty or so jumpers who go over the railing each year, current intervention methods (surveillance cameras, emergency phones on the bridge, and alleged special patrol attention) catch fifty to eighty, by most estimates.
Many are surprised that in San Francisco, where every platform seems to have an audience, the concerns about the Golden Gate’s fatal attraction inspire apathy. Suicidologists see that as a reflection of the time-honored stigmatization and abhorrence of the suicidal. This has taken a perverse form in the Bay Area media’s ‘countdown fever’ to the milestone 500th (in 1973) and 1000th (in 1995) suicide from the bridge. Among others, the Marin County coroner’s office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have pleaded with the media to downplay the suicides. While there is good evidence that media coverage can inspire copycat suicides, no one needs to publicize the Golden Gate as a venue; it is ubiquitous in the Bay Area. This may perhaps be part of the reason that several wrongful-death lawsuits brought by survivors of Bridge jumpers have been thrown out of court.
The essayist concludes that building an anti-suicide barrier
would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on …the far side of the railing. (Its designer) believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man’s control over nature, and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within. —The New Yorker
The article says that many who work on the Golden Gate Bridge deal with the constant presence of suicide by distancing themselves from it. ‘I don’t like those people, I’ve got my own problems’, one is quoted as saying. But from its non-technical perspective, this thoughtful essay joins the ranks of important psychiatric papers which urge that the only way those of us who deal with the suicidal can be of help is to embrace fully the dizzying encounter with what it means to be truly and poignantly contemplating ending one’s own existence. Boston psychoanalysts Dan Buie and John Maltsberger, for example, under whom I was privileged to study, in a classical paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1974 which remains unsurpassed as a primer of suicide assessment and treatment (but do psychiatric or psychological trainees ever get exposed to it anymore??), suggested that we are faced with two typical potential reactions to the suicidal patient — hatred or avoidance. The impact of disgust or contempt for the patient is intuitively clear; what Buie and Maltsberger point out is the malignant effect of trying to avoid hating them by avoiding them or their issues. Most of us do not have the stomach for the discovery that the barriers between us and them are so slim and that, in getting to know them, we might be getting to know something horrifying about ourselves. This is, I fear, a large part of the societal stigmatization of the mentally ill and a contribution to keeping the jumpers going over the railing.
