People committing suicide would tend to jump off the bridge into the water? There are, very roughly, one person committing suicide per fortnight from the Goldengate Bridge.
One idea to slow down that number o fdeaths is to install a big net. It'll hurt when people land on it, and that might be enough to snap them out of the impulsive decision to end their lives.
The net would cost about $45m.
Some people might feel that spending the money on mental health services and suicide prevention services would be a better investment.
Superficially it's obvious why Fresno CA has such a high suicide rate (14.8 per 100,000) - low employment, high crime, staggering drug (especially meth) addiction. But Sacramento CA has higher rates of suicide (22.7 per 100,000), and it's not as easy to work out why.
Installing nets isn't necessarily a terrible thing. Suicide is often impulsive and so suicide prevention often features mechanisms to reduce access to methods of suicide. Installing nets is one example.
Of course, once you've retrieved someone from a net you need to give them access to other interventions and I'm guessing these are missing for Foxconn workers. Sadly, they're also missing for a bunch of people in different countries.
I read something about How The Mapo Bridge In South Korea Has Stopped People Committing Suicide [1]. They basically have illuminated signs that say encouraging things to people who are thinking about jumping. Dropped the suicide rate by 77%.
They link to Zero Suicide, which is good, but they should also link to Suicide Safer Communities which is possibly more effective to reduce rates of suicide because it recognises that suicide prevention is everyone's business, and that suicide isn't limited to people with diagnosed mental illness.
From previous coverage I recall, and a current search (from the USA) just confirmed, that above the first search result is a phone number for a suicide-prevention hotline.
Beyond that, do you have any evidence that "these links are enough to push people over the edge"?
It's possible the opposite is true: that receiving instant, accurate, agenda-free information about suicide actually reduces completed suicides, for example by exercising the imagination harmlessly, or making the details more salient and revulsive, or other mechanisms. You'd have to study the effects to be sure -- not just make guesses from intuition, which can be especially misleading when dealing with mood-disturbed masses.
We have small amounts of weak evidence, mostly from interviews of people who survived suicide attempts and people who self harm who say that this kind of intervention is helpful.
See also signs in multistory carparks and different packaging (and reduced pack sizes) for paracetamol.
I do a lot of searching for suicide related stuff, and I already see quite a lot of similar advice. I guess I'm about to see a lot more of it.
Yes it is. Reminds me of the case where NYU installed fences in the Bobst library to prevent more suicides [0]. Basically it comes down to not being concerned about the causes but find a solution to prevent the suicides on the premises of the campus. I see it as, go kill yourself someplace else, we don't want the negative image.
Yes. My point wasn't about merely preventing suicide, but about stopping people feeling suicidal, even if they don't consider or go through the actual act.
So not so much about saving lives in the technical sense, but about saving people by making them have lives worth living, and see life as such. Preventing things like bullying, abusive parents/spouses, job precarity and homelessness, and so on.
They're being installed on bridges all over the US for exactly that reason.
For example: https://www.goldengate.org/district/district-projects/suicid...
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