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Places That Attract Suicides

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KeyserXSoze

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Feb 8, 2004

Every Month, They Come to Las Vegas Not to Gamble but to Commit Suicide
By Adam Goldman
Associated Press Writer

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Lawrence Orbe didn't come to the Las Vegas Strip looking to win big. He didn't come for the strippers or over-the-top shows.
He came to die.

Orbe, 64, checked into the exclusive Four Seasons Hotel on March 11 after driving his silver Jaguar from his condominium in Montecito, Calif.

Five days later, a maid found the businessman in his room, slumped in a chair with a gunshot wound to the head and a suicide note in his leather briefcase.

"Las Vegas was one of his very favorite places," said his former wife, Loni Chiarella. "They always treated him like a king. He loved Las Vegas."

Every year desperate men and women make the pilgrimage to the gambling capital to kill themselves. More than once a month, a visitor commits suicide here, according to Clark County Coroner records dating to October 1998.

By comparison, Atlantic City, N.J., had about one-third as many nonresidents take their lives during that period. In the same six years, no one committed suicide at Disney World.

"They pick Las Vegas and kill themselves," former Clark County Coroner Ron Flud said. "It's a fact."

But saying exactly why is not so straightforward.

Experts and family members have their thoughts - from the city's culture of anonymity to despair, in some cases, over gambling losses. But each case is different.

As one suicide note said, "Here there are no answers."

---

Orbe married Chiarella in Las Vegas three years ago and found the city luxurious.

"They always showered him with the attention he felt he deserved," she said.

The two had separated and planned to divorce. Chiarella said Orbe was also despondent over recent financial setbacks. But what he was thinking will always be unclear.

"Lawrence remained a mystery to those close to him," she said.

Four months after Orbe's suicide, Gloreah Hendricks, 30, jumped from the ninth floor of the Aladdin hotel-casino parking garage on July 19, 2003.

Her family thought Hendricks was on vacation in Las Vegas, which she considered beautiful, said her mother, Rosemary Pitts of Montgomery, Ala.

In her car, police found a note that said: "One stop and away I go."

Matthew Naylor didn't leave a note before killing himself on June 21, 2002, at the Plaza hotel-casino.

The 31-year-old died from a loss of hope, said his father, Lewis Naylor, an engineer in Baltimore: "He just had a lot of challenges in life and gave up. He couldn't see how it was all going to come together to make a life worth living."

David Strickland, a 29-year-old Hollywood actor, whose wrists were scarred from previous suicide attempts, toured strip clubs and partied before he put a bed sheet around his neck at the Oasis Motel on March 22, 1999.

Strickland was depressed he "had fallen off the wagon," his friend and fellow actor Andy Dick, told investigators. Strickland, who was in Alcoholics Anonymous, was worried his girlfriend would leave him after his relapse.

But why Las Vegas?

"I've asked myself that 100 times," said Judi Kagiwada of Middleboro, Mass., whose 39-year-old husband, Terrence, hanged himself at a downtown casino on March 5, 2003.

Relatives suggest their dead loved ones might have been attracted to a place where you can get lost, and be found only when it's too late.

Experts say some might have been looking for one last sign not to pull the trigger or tie the noose: A jackpot, blackjack or smile. Anything.

"You're in a place that nobody cares. It's not famous for being warm and fuzzy. It's a place you can be anonymous and die," said David P. Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, who co-authored a 1997 study that found Las Vegas had the highest level of suicide in the nation for residents and visitors.

Still, he said, "I wouldn't bet big money on any particular explanation" behind the deaths.

Victims included a banker, musician, immigration officer, pharmacist, exotic dancer, taxi cab driver, disc jockey, car salesman and professional gambler. Most came from California, same as the tourists. Others hailed from Texas, Wisconsin, New York, Utah, Kansas, Maine and Oklahoma - 26 states and two foreign countries in all.

Almost all had medical, financial or domestic problems. In some cases, victims appeared to suffer from gambling addictions or killed themselves only after Las Vegas took their money.

Elton Beamish, 24, drove to Las Vegas from Ann Arbor, Mich., where he was a student at the University of Michigan. He checked into a motel Jan. 12, 2000. Four days later he was dead. His checkbook told the story.

Beamish lost his financial-aid money and became depressed. He bought a 12-gauge shotgun from Kmart, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

---

Suicide destinations exist around the world, the most famous of which is the Golden Gate Bridge, where more than 1,000 people have jumped to their deaths since the bridge was constructed in 1937. It averages about 20 suicides a year.

Other places resonate with the suicidal, such as Mount Mihara in Japan and the Empire State Building in New York.

Las Vegas is different. It has no association with death, even though in 2001 Nevada ranked third behind New Mexico and Montana in suicide rates, according to the American Association of Suicidology. For many years it was No. 1.

From 1991 to 2002, 4,994 people killed themselves in Nevada. Of those, about 11 percent, or 547, were from out of state. Most suicides take place in southern Nevada's populous Clark County, home to the Strip and its decadence and debauchery.

"Vegas is a canvas for American neurosis," UNLV history professor Hal Rothman said. "It's a place where we paint our hopes, dreams, fears and apprehensions. ... It's the city of excess. What could be more of an excess than killing yourself?"

"The average person who comes here still sees it as Sin City, where the rules of their lives have been suspended, where their actions have no consequences."

There are consequences to suicide, of course.

The body of William L. Mauldin III was discovered Aug. 2, 1999, in a swath of rocky dirt next to New York-New York hotel-casino's 10-story parking garage.

In the 32-year-old disc jockey's pocket was a note for his mother: "Tell her I'm sorry and I love her with all my heart. I have been depressed for almost a year now. Don't blame anyone but me."

Finding the body would have devastated family members, and that may partly explain why William chose Las Vegas, brother Rob Mauldin said. "He was probably trying to protect love ones from the horror."

Nothing protects families from the long-term hurt that follows the death notification, and yet county Coroner Michael Murphy said the news doesn't always come as a shock.

"Some even expect the call," he said.

---

More than 90 people, both tourists and locals, have committed suicide inside a casino or on hotel properties in Clark County since 1998. Twenty have jumped from casinos and parking garages, including three from the Stratosphere hotel-casino, the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

Casino companies could do more, but they "don't want to be connected to us," says Dorothy Bryant, director of the Suicide Prevention Center in Las Vegas. Hotels could place the center's hot line number in rooms or other places for guests, she says.

Alan Feldman, MGM Mirage senior vice president for public affairs, said saving people who are suicidal once they arrive in Las Vegas probably is impossible.

"If a person's closest friends and family ... can't prevent it," Feldman said, "How is the bellman at the hotel all of a sudden going to have this miraculous cure? I don't know if there is very much we can do."

---

It was not a hot line but coincidence that saved one 51-year-old Texas man's life. Seven and a half years ago, he bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas to kill himself.

"I came here knowing I was going to do it," he said at his Las Vegas apartment, speaking on condition that he not be identified. "I felt very comfortable with it. All of sudden nothing bothered me."

He checked into the Westward Ho hotel-casino on the Strip and wandered the city drinking and gambling for about two weeks before finally deciding to die July 19, 1996.

He cut some nylon rope from the room's curtains, looped it around a pipe and tied a noose. A maid caught him testing the rope. Police arrived and there was a standoff. He told officers he had a bomb so they wouldn't rush him.

Thinking of his mother, he later changed his mind and surrendered.

The Vietnam veteran, who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, according to his doctor, was institutionalized, given treatment and eventually released.

Suicide is never far away - he's tried it twice since.

Las Vegas will be his final stop, though it's hard for him to say precisely why.

"I always felt something lured me here. This was my destiny. I can't get away from it. I can't get out from under it. It's going to end here. I can tell you that."
Click to expand...

ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAUO5PDFQD.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full above) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040210013918/http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAUO5PDFQD.html

Very sad indeed.
 
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This is a story about the Goldengate Bridge and the 1,250 people who have committed suicide by jumping from it since the bridge opened in 1937. 34 sucessful suicides were recorded in 2006. The article also details a documentary about the bridge called: The Bridge!

Death in America
Killian Fox

Published 19 February 2007

A shocking documentary about jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge has prompted a long-overdue debate about suicide


The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is the most photographed man-made structure in America. It is also the world's leading suicide location. More than 1,250 people have thrown themselves off the bridge since it opened to the public 70 years ago.

In the opening minutes of a controversial new documentary, we watch as a man stands on the Golden Gate walkway, staring down at the water 67 metres below. Coming to a decision, he hoists himself over the low railing and gains a foothold on the other side. A moment goes by and then, before our eyes, he pushes away into mid-air. We watch him fall. Four entire seconds stretch out before the splash.

It's a shocking start to a film that has caused outrage since word of it began to filter out last year. A first-time director named Eric Steel trained a number of cameras on the Golden Gate throughout 2004, capturing all but one of that year's 24 suicidal leaps from the bridge on camera. The press got wind of the story and, before Steel's film had even been screened, it was being denounced as "irresponsible", "exploitative", "voyeuristic", "ghastly" and "immoral". One commentator labelled it a "snuff movie".

Men and women do fall to their deaths on screen in The Bridge - six in total - but Steel argues that those who come to see it for voyeuristic reasons will leave disappointed. The film is more concerned with the circumstances that led to each jump, which it explores through interviews with witnesses and people close to the victims. "Each splash," says Steel, "sets in motion a very intimate journey into a person's life."

These splashes occur with sickening regularity. Tad Friend, the staff writer at the New Yorker whose 2003 article "Jumpers" inspired Steel to make the film, described them to me as "a very steady metronome of people jumping off the bridge - about one every two weeks". This ratio does not take into account the failed attempts, thwarted by police patrols and passers-by, nor the many deaths that go unreported every year.

"Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it's a gateway to another world," says Dr Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. "They think that life will slow down in those final seconds and then they'll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver."

"The bridge has a false romantic promise to it," says a friend of Daniel "Ruby" Rubinstein, one of the jumpers in the film. Ruby couldn't afford health insurance, and ended up begging his friends for antidepressants. "Maybe, walking out there, he had a romantic moment or two . . . But hitting the water can't have been fun."

"It is a violent, vile, terrible, murderous death," 24-year-old Kevin Hines tells me. "People believe that you just hit the water and disappear into the abyss and then you die. But in reality, it's painful and it lasts a long time." He should know. Severely bipolar, Hines went through a particularly black episode in September 2000, when he was 18. He had seen a website that pinpointed the Golden Gate as an effective place to commit suicide, so the next morning he took a bus there. He paced back and forth along the walkway for 40 minutes, weeping openly. A German woman asked him to take her photograph. He obliged, then thought to himself, "Fuck it, nobody cares," and vaulted over the railing.

"The second my hands left the bar, I realised I didn't want to die," he says. Somehow, he manoeuvred himself into an upright position and endured the 120kph impact. Splinters of bone from his lower lumbar region flew up into his organs but missed his heart, and he became one of 26 people who have survived the plunge. "Do you want to know why the Golden Gate is such an attraction for people trying to end their lives?" Hines asks. "It's the four-foot rail."

Ever since the bridge was completed in 1937, people have been campaigning for a suicide- prevention barrier. Friend highlighted the issue in his New Yorker article, noting that, over the years, proposed barrier solutions have been rejected by the Golden Gate board for aesthetic and financial reasons. He believes that The Bridge has pushed the campaign forward. "It has had an immediate practical effect, and in that way alone I think it's a very important film." Steel is less certain. "If you stop the jumps," he says, "people will probably find other places to end their lives. It requires a more global approach. You have to fix the problem at the bridge, but you also need to come up with better ways to deal with mental illness and suicide prevention in the community. One without the other is pointless."

In 2004, as Steel and his crew were filming the Golden Gate, 32,439 people killed themselves in America. By contrast, there were 17,357 homicides that year. The rate of suicides continues to stand at almost twice the murder rate. If this statistic is widely known in the United States, it is not reflected in the media. News outlets tend not to report suicides for fear of provoking copycat attempts - a justifiable fear in San Francisco, where countdowns to the 500th and 1,000th Golden Gate fatalities in 1973 and 1995 sparked jumping frenzies. Nor does suicide receive much coverage in the arts, and the furore generated by Steel's film, one of few recent attempts to raise questions about suicide on screen, supports the notion that the subject is taboo.

"In documentaries about gang violence, or Rwanda, or anything not involving suicide, showing death on screen is OK," says Hines. "But if it's about doing it to yourself - that's untouchable." Part of the problem, in his view, is the stigma attached to mental illness. "Even people in mental health can be prejudiced," he says. "I have to live with it every day. Because I'm labelled as bipolar and I did what I did, I must be a complete psychopath." Hines has nothing but praise for Steel's film. He is adamant that, rather than glorifying death at the bridge, the film is an effective deterrent, and he hopes it will go some way towards breaking the silence.

The Bridge may be a force for positive change, but certain troubling ethical issues remain. When Steel applied for a shooting permit in November 2003, he concealed his true intentions, pitching a study of the "spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge". The friends and families of those who jumped, whom Steel interviewed while the shoot was still under way, were also kept in the dark.

"I couldn't risk word getting out and having someone die as a result of the film," Steel says. "Clearly, there are people who are unbalanced and who would be seeking attention in the worst possible way. I had to have enough faith in my own sensibility and my ability to be respectful with the footage."

Even if the authorities had agreed to the actual project, media pressure would have halted the shoot within days. It is clear, however, that the director's decision to dupe people connected with the suicides is the weakest link in an argument for an already controversial project.

When news of the film broke, some of the interviewees spoke angrily to the press. Now, unexpectedly, they are becoming Steel's strongest line of defence. Following a screening for friends and families in San Francisco last April, one of them - Mary Manikow - retracted her complaint that she had been "used", saying she felt "positively pleased" to have been involved with the film. Another, Matt Rossi, gave the film-maker a tearful hug and thanked him for making it.

The Bridge premièred at the San Francisco Film Festival at the end of April. In May, four deaths and 11 attempted jumps were reported by the Golden Gate board, which wasn't slow to blame the increase on extensive coverage for the film. The director is unrepentant. "From my experience, April to June was always the worst period at the bridge," he says. "Of course the authorities want to make me the bad guy here. But the only way to stop suicides is to put up a barrier. The answer is not to stop showing the movie."

Friend agrees. "Since the bridge's status as a suicide magnet is hardly a secret, people are going to continue jumping off it even in the absence of media attention. Perhaps, rather than ignoring the problem, one should try to address it." Steel is quick to emphasise that the camera operators, who were planted on either side of the bridge at a considerable distance from the walkway, alerted bridge patrols whenever they believed someone was planning to jump. He claims that six deaths were averted as a result. "I guarantee there has not been a film made about Iraq in which the film-maker can say they saved six lives."

The Marin County coroner, Ken Holmes, announced last month that at least 34 people died at the bridge in 2006. A study of suicide deterrents (the eighth undertaken by the bridge board to date) has yet to reach a decision. And meanwhile, at a steady pace of about one every two weeks, the jumps continue to happen.

"The Bridge" (18) is in cinemas from 16 February

http://www.newstatesman.com/200702190033
Click to expand...
 
The Leap

Greetings,

Suicide is a subject that, sadly many of us know as a fact of life.
The debate as to ones rights is a very tangled issue.
This article reminded me of a similar one bout the "Sky-Way Bridge" Tampa Bay, Fla.
The method of self termination is what gets me. Leaping to my death would be very low on my list.
A well aimed shot from a fire arm, perhaps a bunch of drugs. Maybe even a snake bite!
I DO NOT LIKE SNAKES.......
The truth is that none of us knows what lay beyond the veil . Another truth is, we will all find out.
I know that as soon as my feet had left a firm foundation of an Earth structure and I fell to the ground I would for the last time regret an action I did willingly .
As for me?
I want to see what is around the next corner.

PEACE!
=^..^=217
 
I thought this was a good article when I read it last month: -

The Sunday Times

January 07, 2007

The bridge of broken dreams

Every year, dozens of people attempt suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — and a new documentary shows them taking the fatal leap off it. Many think it’s one of the sickest, exploitative films ever made. But its director believes it will actually save lives. Report by John-Paul Flintoff

At the hospital, after surgery on his broken back, Kevin Hines was visited by a Franciscan monk. “His name was George Cherry,” Hines remembers. “He’d pray with me and do the rosary.” Cherry told Hines he’d been blessed, given a second chance. “He said I couldn’t just sit on my butt. He said I had a voice. I had to use it. I had to tell people my story.” Hines wasn’t immediately impressed. “I thought, ‘Whoa, that’s a bit heavy, I don’t want to talk to anyone about this again.’ ” But soon afterwards, his family priest said much the same. He begged Hines, as a favour, to write something down. And soon Hines found himself at a school, giving a speech to dozens of 13- and 14-year-olds.

What Hines told the children was this: on a weekend in September 2000, he’d written a suicide letter, bought sweets for a last meal, and ridden a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge, in San Francisco, where he lives. Like many suicidal people, Hines had a plan: if someone noticed his despair, he would stop. “I’m crying softly to myself, waiting, you know, for that… for that angel to come down and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ And that in itself is just a grandiose kind of the psychotic nature of suicidal thought. That’s not how the world works. People don’t have telepathy.”

On the bridge, a tourist asked him to take her picture, but failed to notice his tears. “And she walked away. I took a couple steps back and I ran and threw myself over the rail. At that moment, the second my hand left the bar, I thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to die. What did I do?’ ”

The drop typically lasts four seconds at 120mph. Hines used the time to manoeuvre his body so he would hit the water feet first and survived the jump. He’s not exactly proud of that: “I make it clear when I talk to kids that what I did wasn’t good, not awesome, not cool. I say it was terrible, it hurt a lot of people, still hurts them.”

That first time, at the school, the children clapped and hands went up. “They wanted to know what it felt like to jump, what it feels like to hit the water. Some asked really intelligent questions, like, ‘When were you diagnosed with mental illness?’ and ‘What is bipolar disorder?’ and ‘What are you doing now?’ Afterwards, encouraged by their teachers, 120 children wrote Hines personal letters of thanks. “I read them all, and six of them were kids who needed help.”

In ancient Greece and Rome, suicide was seen as honourable or heroic. Eleven instances of suicide are mentioned in the Old Testament: they’re reported simply, with no negative overtones. But in the early years of Christianity, St Augustine pronounced suicide a mortal sin, and for many centuries those who died by “self-slaughter” were denied burial in hallowed ground. England and Wales were the last countries in Europe to decriminalise suicide: until 1961, people in Britain were still being sent to prison for attempting to kill themselves.

Today, at least 140,000 people attempt suicide each year in England and Wales. That’s about 12 men and three women in every 100,000 people. One in five who tried will try again, of whom 10% will succeed. In the US, the ratio is higher: 18 men and four women in every 100,000 kill themselves. The most popular location for suicide in the US – if not the world – is the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2004, 24 people killed themselves by jumping. All but one were caught on camera by Eric Steel and can be watched in his forthcoming film, The Bridge.

Having seen it, I can confirm that it makes bleak viewing. And it’s hard to tell if you’re merely viewer or voyeur. Many people, hearing about Steel’s film, shudder with revulsion. How can he have filmed people jumping, and why would he want to show them? Another charge levelled at it is that it might provoke “copycat” suicides. Following a serious drug overdose in the TV hospital drama Casualty, presentations for self-poisoning increased by 17% in the week after the broadcast and 9% in the second week. Of those who’d seen it, 20% said the show had influenced their decision to take an overdose and 17% said it influenced their choice of drug.

It seems odd that anyone would need a model for suicide, but there is plentiful evidence that this is the case. On a web page devoted to jumping off the Golden Gate, I found this: “I had no idea there would be information about this? It is a plan of mine in time to travel there, get a cheap motel for a week or so and write my goodbye letters. I can’t believe others have that same plan? Do you know how much a motel would cost me? Also, can a pedestrian walk to and on the bridge? I appreciate any
info you might have. Thank you…” The comment was posted in 2004 by a man called Patrick, who may be dead now.

Meeting Steel in London, I asked if he had misgivings about making his film. He didn’t. “People seem to fear that you can be influenced by this, as if it were infectious, like a cold,” he said. “The message has been, ‘Don’t show.’ But the bridge already does have a copycat problem.”

A grizzled, unshaven man wearing a dark denim shirt and jeans, Steel looked terribly tired. He was jet-lagged, he said. I wondered if the weary appearance may also be due to the criticism he’s faced recently. “Originally, criticism of the film was from people who hadn’t seen a single frame of footage. I think people are just so afraid of this, they’d rather find a way to condemn it beforehand. And make me the bad guy.”

Starting on January 1, 2004, Steel shot 10,000 hours of film. He had one set of cameras at bridge level and one at water level. There were two cameras in each place: a wide angle and a telephoto. And the cameras were controlled all the time, from sunrise to sunset. Before shooting began, Steel discussed intervention with his crew and they agreed always to try to prevent a suicide attempt. Direct-line numbers for bridge officials were saved on everyone’s mobile as speed-dial numbers. “The first day, so many people made us concerned. We couldn’t hear them talk, we weren’t experts at body language. We saw hundreds crying, dozens pulling their hair and mumbling. Those ones never jumped. The first person I saw jump was in jogging clothes. He’d run out onto the bridge and was laughing on his cellphone. He hung up, took off his sunglasses and jumped in a matter of seconds.”

One man, Gene Sprague, bestrode the bridge for 90 minutes. “I watched him walk back and forward. I never knew he was going to do this. He looked free to me, with his hair blowing around, then he sat on the rail and died. He must have thought, ‘I’m going to kill myself, I’m not going to kill myself.’ Now I know so much about him; it seems he spent his whole life doing that.”

The film includes an interview with a photographer from Pittsburgh, who began taking pictures of a girl about to jump, then put down his camera and hoicked her over the rail to safety. She bit him, but he sat on her until help arrived. In later days and weeks, she came back to the bridge. “She had this routine with a hat and her make-up. And when we realised it was her, we called [the authorities].”

What makes the film compelling, Steel says, is not the deathly footage, but the act of bearing witness. “What we witnessed was also witnessed by others. That act of witness is in the world – we weren’t the only ones. If it was just about the footage, we’d have dropped the interviews.”

He’s talking about interviews with the families and friends. After the bodies were recovered, they were brought to Marin County, where the coroner, Ken Holmes, has the unenviable task of notifying families. Typically, these families have questions, then more questions. At Steel’s request, Holmes asked families if they’d be willing to be interviewed in the film. “Most were agreeable,” Holmes says, “though a couple refused to discuss the idea that this was a suicide at all.”

Steel did the interviews himself. It was never easy. In March he saw Wally and Mary Manikow: their son Philip had died in January. “I wanted to get the stories at the point when families were maybe out of the most intense period of grief, but still trying to work out what was happening.”

Mary Manikow recalls feeling ambivalent. “The feelings were very raw. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk… When a person jumps, people feel it’s all their fault. I had a daughter, Sharon, 24, who committed suicide two years earlier. To have it happen twice, I thought, ‘What is wrong with me?’ I felt really alone.”

After the interview, Steel recalls: “Mrs Manikow made us dinner, lasagne. The neighbours were just over the fence, and I asked if they’d been helpful when Philip died, and she said, ‘I don’t think they even know Philip has gone.’ That was one of the most haunting things for me.”

Controversially, Steel did not tell the families and friends that he had the suicides on film. “My biggest fear,” he explains now, “was word would get out about what we were doing and someone who wasn’t thinking clearly would see it as an opportunity to immortalise themselves on film.”

He planned to tell the families at the end of the project, and show the footage if they wanted to see it. But before he got the chance, the local paper found out about the project and public controversy exploded. So he got in touch with the families he’d interviewed. “I said, ‘You have to believe I’m a sensitive person. We’re all doing this to save lives, not to exploit people.’ Almost all of them felt that way, but [some] didn’t.”

As Steel sees it, the individuals made a choice to kill themselves publicly. Holmes, the coroner, evidently likes Steel, and believes his intentions to be honourable, but takes a slightly different view. “I don’t think I can say there is a difference between people who kill themselves publicly and privately. Many of them go into a zone. That girl. She didn’t care that the man with the camera was there. She was hellbent. And the man with the long hair didn’t look at the people nearby. There was seldom, if ever, any eye contact.”

This is Steel’s first film as director, but he has worked in the movies for years as an executive. At Disney he worked for Jeffrey Katzenberg, then left to work for Scott Rudin, a well-known producer in New York. For a long while, he wanted his own project. “Then I read this article in The New Yorker magazine about the Golden Gate and the suicides, and thought, ‘I should do this.’” He was at work, a mile from the World Trade Center, on the morning of 9/11. “If you took out binoculars, you could see people jumping. That’s what I saw. That idea of people jumping and making a choice stuck with me.”

As he puts it, Steel has had “a hard life”. His brother died of cancer at 17, and his sister was killed by a drink-driver 18 months later. “I have to say, I’ve had a lot of despair. There have been mornings when I’ve woken and thought, ‘Why don’t I kill myself?’ It enters our heads and passes through. Like it does for many people. I don’t think this is necessarily morbid. We all think a bit about dying. As rough as my life has been, when people meet me they don’t suddenly think, ‘Oh, you’ve had a life of great losses.’ You never know what people are struggling with. We’re trained to present the strongest image we can. We don’t wear signs that say, ‘I need help.’

“It’s up to us to feel we can pull someone back. If the standard view is that we should go along with our lives, let others get on with it, that’s like the most disturbing part of the film, where joggers just pass by people about to jump. With Gene [Sprague], if he really wanted to kill himself, maybe he’d have done it before.

He did let his friends save him, once before, in St Louis. I don’t think it’s entirely black for these people. We didn’t include the footage of people who tried to swim when they hit the water – and why would you do that if you didn’t want to live?”

Why didn’t he show that? “To me, it seemed like the stories that were important were about people living, then coming to the moment when they weren’t living. We did show one body being pulled out, but we didn’t show it over and over. Suicide-prevention experts would love to have the film narrated by experts, but I wanted to show the way it felt, not explain.”

Steel says most documentaries these days are illustrated essays. “The Enron film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Al Gore’s film – they’re all interesting but I wanted this to have no narrative.” As a result, the film is discomforting to watch, not only because of its subject. The seemingly unstructured shape, the moody, artistic longueurs, and the unsensational direction combine to flirt, at times, with tedium. Watching it, I found myself wishing for something dramatic to happen – rather shamefully, because that could only mean another suicide.

I also wondered if the film suffers from the necessary absence of its “stars”: Steel made a choice to include only still photos, no home- movie footage or anything like that.

“The only movement of the camera is the tracking one way or another on the bridge. The film is very much like still photos. The director of photography said I was crazy, that it would never work. I said, ‘You have to just trust me.’

“When someone dies, there’s this big splash. And within minutes, it’s like nothing ever happened. All the ripples go away. The traffic keeps moving, the pedestrians are walking, and the water’s going under the bridge, but for the families, that ripple keeps going for ever.”

Steel’s greatest wish is for suicide, and the mental illness that lies behind it, to be better understood. “My grandfather died in the 1960s of prostate cancer and people didn’t talk about that then. Now you have marches and badges for colon cancer. But we don’t have the same kind of coverage for mental illness.” He adds something that astonishes me, but turns out to be correct: “You’d never know from the media that twice as many people die of suicide as homicide in the US.”

All the same, I wonder if he needed the actual footage of suicides to raise awareness. Why not make a film using only the interviews with family and friends? I mention Werner Herzog’s award-winning documentary, Grizzly Man, in which Herzog chose not to show the footage of the naturalist Timothy Treadwell’s death by mauling. Instead, viewers see only Herzog, listening to the ghastly audio. “When you have footage, when people are forced to confront it as a witness, it changes the picture completely. People say I’m bad because I filmed it! Rather than say they’re the bad guys for letting people kill themselves year after year after year.”

He’s talking about the bridge authorities – his fiercest critics – who refuse to put up a barrier on the Golden Gate. “If there were a two-mile stretch of road and two dozen people died at that stretch of road year after year after year after year,” he says, “the people responsible for that stretch of road would feel compelled to take drastic action to stop 24 people from dying the next year.”

It’s this point that seems to have secured support from the families and friends of people whose deaths Steel filmed. Mary Manikow saw it for the first time at the Tribeca film festival in New York. “When I saw myself up there I felt very exposed,” she recalls, “very vulnerable. Suicide is a very private affair.” But she says taking part in the film was absolutely worthwhile. “Watching people jump is sombre, and shocking. I think it made a great impact. I don’t regret doing this film. I feel positively pleased.”

Kevin Hines, the rare survivor, jumped off the Golden Gate four years before Steel set up his cameras there. But Hines agreed to take part in Steel’s film, and provides a stirring account of his fall. He now considers Steel “a friend”, and agrees with Manikow about the project’s merit. “I don’t think this is a voyeuristic film,” says Hines. “It’s a beautiful movie about life and death. Eric Steel has made a movie that’s going to change lives.”

As a figurehead for suicide prevention, Hines – who continues to struggle with bipolar disorder – has met all kinds of people. “I have talked to CEOs and homeless people, and they say, ‘Why don’t you let it go?’ or ‘Snap out of it.’ That’s sad. You see a guy with a broken arm and you know it’s broken and you say, ‘Let me sign your cast.’ No one wants to sign your forehead when there’s mental illness.”

He hopes the film will teach people to change that attitude. He also hopes to teach young people that the things that worry and upset them will not endure. “When I end my speech, I always say to the kids, ‘You realise that you might be 45 one day?’ and they say, ‘Yeech!’ ‘You might have grey hair…?’ ‘Yeech!’ My point is, today isn’t everything.”

Most of all, he hopes to prevent anyone having to learn to value their future life in the same horrific way he did. In the 1970s, he says, somebody did some research and found 28 people who jumped, like Hines, and survived. “They talked to them about it. It turns out, as soon as they hit free fall, they all thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to die.’”

The Bridge is released on February 16

© Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd
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...Werner Herzog’s award-winning documentary, Grizzly Man, in which Herzog chose not to show the footage of the naturalist Timothy Treadwell’s death by mauling. Instead, viewers see only Herzog, listening to the ghastly audio.
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There wasn't any footage of Treadwell's death, only audio. His partner left the camcorder running in their tent while the attacks went on so the sounds were recorded.
 
Why are there no volunteers from the Samaritans or other such organisations there, like there are at Beachy Head?
Brother in Law was sat on a bench at Beachy head early one morning and a chap from the Samaritans came and sat a talked to him. He reassured him he was fine and not about to kill himself. Nice to know that there are people who do that though.
 
personally i think this is a very important film, but the samaritans don't seem to see it that way:

Samaritans criticise suicide film

A documentary about people jumping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge has been criticised by The Samaritans, who say it may lead to "copycat" suicides.

A camera crew spent a year filming The Bridge, capturing six leaps on film.

A statement from the helpline charity said some people could be influenced by media coverage. "We do not accept that this is an 'art' film," it said.

Director Eric Steel has said he is "concerned" about copycats - but that the film should not be suppressed.

"The answer is showing the film, having a discussion and trying to come up with local solutions to a local problem and broader solutions to a universal problem," he told the BBC News website earlier this month.

He also said he helped save six lives by alerting authorities to suicide attempts.

'No choice'

"As soon as someone put their foot on the rail, the first thing we did was call the bridge patrol," he said.

"I don't think we could have lived with ourselves if we had made any other choice."

The Samaritans said around 6% of suicides were "copycat suicides".

"We therefore criticise the showing of this film, and the makers for their reported methods of obtaining their footage," the statement said.

"Certain types of media coverage are potentially harmful and can act as a catalyst to influence the behaviour of people who are already vulnerable."
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6380153.stm
 
What actually happens to the human body when someone jumps into water from that height?
 
When I was at the Golden Gate bridge I was struck that although the concept of American freedom can sound like a bit of old guff at times it was perfectly on display there.

A nice conveniently low barrier, so if you really want to jump you can, but lots of emergency phones for jumpees or witnesses if you need help. It just seemed kind to make the business easy but with measures in place to facilitate a cry for help.
 
There is a meme - I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but if it's not true it's widely believed, which has the same practical effect - that any publicity of any sort given to suicide is correlated with a rise in the suicide rate in the area covered by the publicity; i.e., if a teen magazine published an article on depression and the warning signs of suicide, a statistically significant portion of teens who read that issue would commit suicide before the next issue came out.

If true, this poses a horrific conumdrum for anyone wishing to raise awareness of how to prevent suicide and recognize and treat depression. You can't educate people without communicating with them! If not true, it still creates a difficulty for media professionals from authors to librarians to network schedulers, because the perception of its truth is so widespread and no one wants to risk being the cause of anyone's suicide, and also creates yet another problem for depressives (who don't need any more, thank you) because it represses open and honest discussion of the subject.

I have an (unpublished, and I don't know where I'd send it next) short story about a depressed girl with a stash of sleeping pills in a drawer, which she has promised herself she can take any night that she can't think of a reason to wake up in the morning. At the end of the the story, which describes a good day haunted by the knowledge that the bad days will come again, she considers taking the pills so as to go out at the top of the curve, but puts them back in order to live one more day "because I want to." I think it's a pretty good story, not a masterpiece by any means but easily worth a cent a word for first American rights, and a realistic depiction of the life of an untreated teenage depressive. I don't know for a fact that anybody who rejected it did so due to this meme; and I often go weeks and months between submissions because I don't always disbelieve the meme enough to risk it. But sometimes I think, What if there's a girl out there who just needs to know that good days follow bad days? Or that she's not an awful person for thinking about these things? What if the meme is just wrong and it's preventing her from being told that? Or what if the meme is right and I'm right and one girl who reads it finds permission to take the pills and another girl reads it and finds hope to continue another day? Or what if...

And then I get a headache, take aspirin, and eat chocolate, because some problems aren't amenable to true solution.
 
PeniG said:
There is a meme - I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but if it's not true it's widely believed, which has the same practical effect - that any publicity of any sort given to suicide is correlated with a rise in the suicide rate in the area covered by the publicity; i.e., if a teen magazine published an article on depression and the warning signs of suicide, a statistically significant portion of teens who read that issue would commit suicide before the next issue came out.

If true, this poses a horrific conumdrum for anyone wishing to raise awareness of how to prevent suicide and recognize and treat depression. You can't educate people without communicating with them! If not true, it still creates a difficulty for media professionals from authors to librarians to network schedulers, because the perception of its truth is so widespread and no one wants to risk being the cause of anyone's suicide, and also creates yet another problem for depressives (who don't need any more, thank you) because it represses open and honest discussion of the subject.
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But don't suicides have to be pretty depressed already by the day they kill themselves? It's not the kind of thing people do on impulse, is it? Who knows what could push them over the edge, but they have to have been brought to the edge in the first place.
 
There's lots of individual variation in suicides. Besides, define "impulse." Most methods don't take much planning. My attempt (which would have been "successful" had I not gotten a phone call which led to me coming to my senses) involved walking three blocks to buy pills and back, hardly a sophisticated or drawn-out process, and though I remember remarkably little about my state of mind, I'm positive I didn't spend days fighting off the desire to buy pills, or working out carefully in what passes for rational thought when depressed that this was the proper thing to do. Some people do that. Some people need a trigger.

Also, "cry for help" suicides which aren't intended to come off may well be impulsive and, because not properly planned, result in death.

Normally, I'm steadfast in my belief that we all have free will, and that free and open discussion of everything always works out, in the long run, to have more beneficial results than not. I certainly don't believe that people need to be shielded from disturbing thoughts and images and words. But I know for a fact that words and images have real beneficial psychological effects, and I'm not prepared to state for a fact that the opposite is never true. Most days, I'm sure that my story would help more than it hurt and would be harmless to most people. Other days I really wish I knew where that meme came from, so I could judge the methodology.

And if you were a convinced that, as a result of your actions, even one person would commit suicide, while any good that might come of it was problematic and unprovable - would you perform that action?
 
PeniG said:
And if you were a convinced that, as a result of your actions, even one person would commit suicide, while any good that might come of it was problematic and unprovable - would you perform that action?
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Of course not, just the same as I would never murder anybody. But as you can never be sure when discussing suicide whether you might help a vulnerable individual or harm them, isn't it better to take the chance that you will be helping? That's what the Samaritans are for, after all.
 
Recent Durch statistics are:

Per year:

410.000 people think about suicide
94.000 people attempts suicide
1600 people succeed in committing suicide

Mentally disturbed people have a nine times higher chance of committing suicide.
 
A few years ago the UK banned the sale of paracetamol in bottles or packs of more than 12 (I think it was 12) to try and cut the suicide rate. I was blisteringly sceptical, thinking "well, if someone wants to kill themselves, that's hardly going to stop them for long".

Turns out though that I was totally wrong - the move was based on 'impulse' suicide attempts, ie girl has big fight with boyfriend, gets drunk, finds a conveniently full bottle of pills in the bathroom cupboard, swallows the lot, rather than people who are suicidally depressed for any length of time.

Apparently it has cut the rate of death by overdose and liver damage through overdose significantly. Very happy to admit I was wrong on this one!
 
hokum6 said:
What actually happens to the human body when someone jumps into water from that height?
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Depends how they land.
Feet first, the best that can be hoped for is a couple of completely shattered legs. Worst case scenario would be the leg bones to be pushed up into the torso. This has happened to pot holers who have fallen great heights in confined places.
Front or back, first, then the rib cage will snap and rip through the lungs, or, the spine will break and do a similar job with other organs.
Head first. Well, I'm sure you can guess, it ain't going to be pleasant.
Jumpers rarely, if ever, drown, nice and peacefully, as they might wish.
 
I'm sure if you jumped you wouldn't be expecting to drown - you'd still be after a speedy exit. It's just that places like the Golden Gate bridge and Beachy Head offer a nice substantial drop that suggests a little more romantic departure than throwing oneself off a multi storey car park or something similar.
 
PeniG said:
There is a meme - I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but if it's not true it's widely believed, which has the same practical effect - that any publicity of any sort given to suicide is correlated with a rise in the suicide rate in the area covered by the publicity; i.e., if a teen magazine published an article on depression and the warning signs of suicide, a statistically significant portion of teens who read that issue would commit suicide before the next issue came out.

If true, this poses a horrific conumdrum for anyone wishing to raise awareness of how to prevent suicide and recognize and treat depression. You can't educate people without communicating with them! If not true, it still creates a difficulty for media professionals from authors to librarians to network schedulers, because the perception of its truth is so widespread and no one wants to risk being the cause of anyone's suicide, and also creates yet another problem for depressives (who don't need any more, thank you) because it represses open and honest discussion of the subject.
Click to expand...


Well it looks like an open and honest discussion of the subject is not the way to go, if you want potential suicide victims to stay alive. Perhaps the only thing stopping any of us killing ourselves at some point in our lives is suppression of the impulse alone, until a high lifts us up again and reinvolves us in life once more, so that we don't want to die?
 
Only if the meme is true, though, and I don't have a source for it. It's just out there floating around.

It's also the exact opposite of my experience. If you don't want teens to get pregnant, people to abuse those they have power over, ordinary folks to die of poor nutritional choices, ethnic groups to hate each other, or dyslexics to think they're stupid, you've got to keep the information flowing. And I know two depressives - one of them me - who haven't committed suicide because they understand the physiological basis of depression and know that it can be waited out. I think a lot of teen suicide is due directly to their not grasping that how they feel right now is not how they are condemned to feel for the rest of their lives. Once you've ridden it out once, you know can do it again and again (though the notion of having to do it again and again is pretty depressing if you think about too long).

There's also anecdotal evidence of a certain kind of heartless, realistic discussion of suicide discouraging the behavior, but it's only going to work on some people. In Lions and Shadows, for example, Christopher Isherwood describes how he went around dropping dark hints to his friends about having bought a gun. A medical student friend respended by cheerfully giving him gruesome advice on the "right" way to do it and the consequences of doing it "wrong." This worked on the narcissistic Isherwood because it gave him what he wanted and needed - attention that undercut his drama rather than encouraging it and pulled the romantic suicidal fantasy into the realm of ugly, unromantic reality. On a different person, the tactic might have backfired, making him feel so unloved and disrespected that he pulled the trigger just to show everybody.

All generalizations are false, and many of them are dangerous. So I don't believe the meme exactly, but the fact that you can't control who reads print material or watches video makes me hesitate anyway.
 
gncxx said:
PeniG said:
And if you were a convinced that, as a result of your actions, even one person would commit suicide, while any good that might come of it was problematic and unprovable - would you perform that action?
Click to expand...

Of course not, just the same as I would never murder anybody. But as you can never be sure when discussing suicide whether you might help a vulnerable individual or harm them, isn't it better to take the chance that you will be helping? That's what the Samaritans are for, after all.
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The basic problem with all this sort of oof is that it kind of assumes that you can be responsible for someone else's emotions or decisions and ultimately, fundamentally, you can't - only they can.

Publishing a short story doesn't 'make' anyone kill themself, in that direct cause and effect way, any more than buying someone a pint 'makes' them say thank you, or video games 'make' people go on killing sprees. Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (I think I spelled it right that time ;) ).

If you are shit-nasty to someone who is obviously depressed and they subsequently take their own life you are not going to feel good about it, but being deliberately unpleasant to people isn't something you should feel especially proud of under any circumstances in my opinion, although it does sometimes seem justified, sometimes you can't seem to help it, and sometimes it is downright fun. Occasionally it is actually perversely an act of kindness. But you cannot go around worrying that any and every random thing you do might impact on someone else's fucked up head. Even if, as an example, your husband does string himself up in the garage after you leave him it is *not* your fault. It's just not a healthy way of thinking.

Took me a long time to work that one out after I 'caused' someone to attempt suicide.
 
undergroundbob said:
A few years ago the UK banned the sale of paracetamol in bottles or packs of more than 12 (I think it was 12) to try and cut the suicide rate.
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The other day I saw a shop with an offer on, prominently displayed at the entrance to the shop, something like "5 bottles of paracetemol for the price of 3!" It must have been illegal, and I remember thinking at the time that I had not seen anything so mind-bogglingly stupid in quite a while.
 
Thanks for those links, the words on the sign sound so haunting.....
 
Just watched 'The Bridge', an amazing piece of cinema. Reminded me a lot of the documentary '102 Minutes That Changed America'.

Obviously you can criticise it for its glorification of suicide or for profiteering from individual suffering, but take it down to base level - a study of human behaviour - and it falls into the same territory of nature documentaries. Where do you intervene on life as it happens around you.

I'm going to California next month for a road trip and GGB is one of the top places I'm excited to visit, having watched this film though I am now a little apprehensive. While most famous landmarks and tourist spots are places of awe and inspiration this one now will be a little tainted for me and I will be slightly on edge that we happen to witness a suicide. Average of 24 in a year means that is a little slim, but still, more likely than say Madame Tussauds or Alton Towers!

Plus, part of me will now feel like talking to anyone stood alone staring out off the structure, which could make for a long trip over!

Anyhow, definitely worth watching. One of the best documentaries I have seen in ages.
 
The trouble with The Bridge is that it may have good intentions due to wanting to prevent suicides off the bridge, but there's the nagging feeling that when they set up their cameras, what they most wanted was to capture someone jumping and dying.

I know they would try to talk to anyone they were worried about, but there had to be better ways of going about their concerns than filming actual death and putting it in their movie. It smacks of needless intrusion into personal tragedy.
 
gncxx said:
The trouble with The Bridge is that it may have good intentions due to wanting to prevent suicides off the bridge, but there's the nagging feeling that when they set up their cameras, what they most wanted was to capture someone jumping and dying.
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Obviously. It'd be a rubbish film if they didn't catch it. But then you can look at it from the point of view that if the cameras had not been there likely there would have been 24 suicides anyway. You can look at it from a voyeuristic point of view, that if you were simply sat on a bench every day for a year looking at the bridge through binoculars you could see the same thing. And you would be as utterly helpless as the cameraman watching from distance.

Depends on your personal feelings I guess. I'm prone to look at the bigger picture of human existence and that when you drill it right down we are just another species of animal on this planet and this docu is just filming an aspect of our behaviour as another would film wild animals. There was a very harrowing BBC film about komodo dragons stalking a wounded mammal over a course of days where the filmmakers could have intervened. I found that hard to watch, just as many probably found this hard.

The story of the teenager who survived made a very positive impression and I feel his part of the film probably does as much to turn people off the idea as the glorification does in giving impressionable minds ideas. How many times do you get to hear from a suicide victim what they felt at the moment they made that choice? very rarely, and his insight that the moment he let go he realised he wanted to live probably captures the feeling of many jumpers.

Obviously it is a very debatable subject matter and no doubt the filmmakers were delighted to capture a few of the plummets but I think the most telling part of the film is the various reactions from the friends and family interviewed. That is in many ways a lot more difficult to watch and comprehend than the actual jumping.

Rightly or wrongly I found it a compelling piece of work that really opened up some questions both about my opinions on suicide and human compassion / indifference towards loved ones / friends. Cannot recommend it highly enough, if you are open to being challenged and going through what is a tough watch.
 
Aokigahara: Suicide Forest

The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and is too dense to patrol more frequently.

Video:
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/vbs-news/aokiga ... rest-v3--2
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I found this rather compelling viewing. Perhaps it's the tone. The park official speaks as though he were an experienced zoologist or a psychologist who has built up a close working knowledge of his subject by detailed observation alone. Macabre but fascinating.

Edit: if you do watch it all, don't miss the postscript that is displayed as the credits start.
 
Somewhere is either a thread on this or it was mentioned in a thread. However as I am useless finding anything on here, so might as well start again. Wasn't it proven to be either a hoax or exaggerated? Still, I find this quite interesting.
 
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