The Final Leap (18 page)

People who are suicidal tend to be less connected to others. Jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge enables them to join for all eternity a large number of people who may be strangers, but with whom they have a common bond—a shared death. This point was made in a February 2010 editorial cartoon in the
Berkeley Daily Planet.
Viewed from underwater were mounds of human skulls, stretching as far as one could see. Above the water was the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It's no surprise that the Golden Gate Bridge is the most photographed man-made structure in the world. It's one of the seven wonders of the modern world and is considered one of the top ten architectural achievements of the twentieth century. No other city has such a famous gateway. No other gateway has inspired more romance or poetry. It's not a stretch to say that life in the Golden State starts at the Golden Gate. When the sun sets over the horizon each night, the last and—some people believe—best views in the continental United States are from the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's an allure to the bridge, Blaustein says, that acts as a magnet to people who are in psychic pain. Add to this the pedestrian access, nearby parking lots, bus stops, and four-foot-high railing, and the pull is only stronger.

In addition to his work at the hospital, where he started in 1980, Blaustein is president of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California. It's a nonprofit organization of 1,200 psychiatrists and is affiliated with the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In recent years, the foundation's primary focus has been advocating for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. Blaustein has presented on the subject at every APA annual conference from 2006 to 2011. He also has published numerous opinion pieces and addressed many audiences, including members of San Francisco's prestigious Commonwealth Club. He tells people that although the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge have three elements in common—they were completed in 1937, the roadway on each is more than two hundred feet high, and they connect at one end to San Francisco—the Bay Bridge doesn't have the mystique of its famous counterpart. According to “A Tale of Two Bridges,” a 1982 study by U.C. Berkeley professor Richard Seiden, half the people who drove cars to the Golden Gate Bridge, then jumped, crossed the Bay Bridge to get there. No one went the other way, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge to jump from the Bay Bridge.

Because aesthetics are important, Blaustein talks about the fact that suicide barriers on the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, and Sydney Harbour Bridge haven't deterred people from continuing to enjoy these structures. The barriers have just prevented people from jumping.

When someone brings up the cost of a suicide barrier, Blaustein replies that money is a relative issue. “The Bay Bridge is costing $6 billion to be retrofitted,” he says. “Andre Agassi sold his house [in nearby Tiburon] for $20 million. My wife is an alumna of the University of North Dakota where hockey is almost a religion. One of the alums donated $150 million for a hockey arena.”

It's not money, Blaustein says, or aesthetics. “The real issue is the value we place on human life.” For many years, Blaustein considered a suicide barrier on the bridge solely from a professional viewpoint. It was needed so that people he and others treated couldn't kill themselves as easily. His feelings changed, he told me, in 2005 after eighteen-year-old Jonathan Zablotny jumped. Blaustein's son and Jonathan were good friends. In addition, Dr. Ray Zablotny, Jonathan's father, was a close colleague. “After Jonathan's death,” Blaustein says, “the barrier became a personal issue.”

The barrier became a personal issue for Dr. Anne Fleming, too. Fleming is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California's medical school in San Francisco. She's also a consulting psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital, where most people who are stopped from jumping are taken for observation and treatment. The notation “BIBP from GGB” on a patient's chart is so common at the hospital that everyone knows what it means: “brought in by police from Golden Gate Bridge.” Fleming has coauthored articles with Blaustein on the need for a suicide barrier. She also has co-presented with him at APA conferences. Her involvement grew after her friend and classmate in medical school, Dr. Phil Holsten, jumped in 2004.

I asked Blaustein why he thinks people in the Bay Area have opposed a barrier when residents of other cities with notable landmarks have come to accept them. After all, the same arguments pertaining to cost, aesthetics, and effectiveness apply. Why have people elsewhere been open to a barrier when local citizens haven't? Why is the attitude of people here different? Blaustein shrugs. “I don't know,” he says. “Free will—this is California.”

The foremost suicide prevention training program in the world is called ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training). It was created more than twenty years ago by a Canadian agency, Living Works, and is taught in dozens of countries, including the United States. It's the training program that's endorsed by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, U.S. Army, and National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The training is intense, two full days. Almost without exception, people who complete the training say that they feel confident in being able to help a person who is suicidal.

An element in ASIST is a diagram that's referred to as the “River of Suicide.” The river cuts through diverse landscapes—a city, suburb, farmland—ending in a waterfall. It represents the opportunities for suicide first aid. People enter the river from many different locations. If they don't get help, they can end up at the waterfall, which signifies a suicide attempt. The point of the diagram is that suicide prevention doesn't start at the waterfall; it happens all along the stream.

One of the people who knows this better than most is Dr. Jerome Motto, a long-time psychiatrist who worked with suicidal patients at the University of California San Francisco. Motto has studied suicide from every angle. He ran a suicide ward for more than three decades. He supervised psychiatric residents at San Francisco General Hospital. He published dozens of articles on suicide in medical journals which, at the time, generally ignored the subject. He also served as president of the American Association of Suicidology and has been on the boards of both San Francisco Suicide Prevention and the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California.

One of the most often-told stories about Golden Gate Bridge suicides concerns a visit Motto made in the 1970s to the apartment of a recent bridge jumper. “The guy was in his 30s,” Motto related, “lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He'd written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I won't jump.' ” Apparently no one did.

Motto doesn't understand why a suicide barrier on the bridge remains an issue. “If people started hanging themselves from the tree in my front yard,” he told the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “I'd have a moral obligation to prevent that from happening. I'd take the limb off, put a fence around it. It's not about whether the suicide statistics would change, or the cost, or whether the tree would be as beautiful. If an instrument that's being used to bring about tragic deaths is under your control, you are morally compelled to prevent its misuse.”

In 1964, when Motto first testified before the Golden Gate Bridge District directors in favor of a suicide barrier, he was forty-two years old. Three initiatives for a suicide barrier had been rejected previously; however, Motto assumed that once board members heard the testimony of mental health professionals like himself, that would change. He was wrong.

Over the ensuing decades, Motto and his colleagues have spoken before the board numerous times. Each time they thought would be the last time, that after hearing the facts, the Bridge District would take action. Each subsequent visit left them feeling stunned that the subject wasn't generating a greater sense of urgency. The Golden Gate Bridge was the most well-known public structure in the world that not only permitted but—by it's low railing and year-round pedestrian access—aided suicide. Didn't people care?

“It's like having a loaded gun on your kitchen table,” Motto says. No matter how much one may try to ignore it, it's always there.

For the U.S. Coast Guard, at least the officers and enlisted personnel at Station Golden Gate, what's always there is the job of retrieving the bodies of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers—two to three per month. It's not something anyone signed up for. “No one came into the Coast Guard to do this mission [recover bridge jumper's bodies],” Leanne Lusk, sector San Francisco command center chief, told me. “We came in to save lives.” “The eyes are the worst,” one former Coast Guard crew member stated, referring to jumpers who are still alive but experiencing cardiac arrest. “It's just the eyes staring at you.”

Based on the number of search and rescue cases, San Francisco Bay is the busiest place in the United States for Coast Guard personnel. Coast Guard Sector San Francisco, which is responsible for search and rescue operations in central and northern California, the Sacramento River Delta, and Lake Tahoe, and also encompasses Station Golden Gate in Marin County and Station San Francisco on Yerba Buena Island, had 1,557 cases in fiscal year 2010 (October 1 to September 30), and 1,664 cases in FY 2009, according to Lieutenant Commander Lusk. By comparison, the next closest Coast Guard sector in the United States had 979 search and rescue cases. One reason for San Francisco's high volume is because the bay is a top sailing spot. It draws a large number of boaters, windsurfers, kitesurfers, and other water enthusiasts. At the same time, the bay's strong currents, choppy water, and shifting shoals can fool even veteran sailors. In addition, there are multiple ports and waterways, plus ferry service in the bay, as well as boat fires and disabled vessels offshore. There's also the Golden Gate Bridge and, to a lesser extent, the Bay Bridge and Richmond-San Rafael Bridge (Station Golden Gate responds to all person-in-the-water calls near the Golden Gate Bridge while Station San Francisco responds to these calls for the other two bridges). All of this activity is why there are forty-five people at Station Golden Gate, forty of whom participate in search and rescue missions. It's one of the largest deployments of personnel in the Coast Guard.

There are four boats at Station Golden Gate. Two are forty-seven-foot motor life boats and two are twenty-five-foot response boats. The larger boats have four-person crews and the smaller boats have a minimum crew of three people. I asked Mark Allstott, commanding officer at Station Golden Gate, if the crews have a boat preference when doing person-in-the-water searches. He said that the larger boats are dispatched if they're available because they're more stable.

When Station Golden Gate receives word of a 10-31—police code for a jump—the crew on duty has four minutes to get dressed, run four hundred yards to the boat, and take off. They arrive within eight to fifteen minutes of the call, says Allstott. Even so, even with such a quick response, the jumper may be swept well beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, somewhere into the open sea. Smoke floats, dropped by police officers from the bridge near where the jumper was last seen, indicate the surface drift, assisting search and rescue teams in their efforts to find the body.

Given the inconvenience as well as the trauma of dealing with Golden Gate Bridge jumpers, some responders resent it. “It's a real thankless job,” according to one former Coast Guard crewman. Another former crewman who worked at Station Golden Gate nearly ten years said that what bothered him the most were spectators. “It used to get me very upset,” he said, “when people would come to where we were and try to get a glimpse of the people who jumped. Let them die in peace. Many died in my arms, and I did what I could to help them pass peacefully.”

For officers on the Golden Gate Bridge Patrol who are constantly on the lookout for signs of potential jumpers, the job requires total concentration. Let your mind wander—even for a moment—and someone could die. The way it is, with ten million pedestrians and bicyclists using the Golden Gate Bridge every year—in addition to forty million vehicles—even being alert and acting quickly isn't always enough to save a life.

Furthermore, there's little formal training for the patrollers. It's more about staying focused and knowing what to look for. Jumpers usually are alone. Their body language hints that they're depressed. Instead of being in motion or stopping to look out at the view, they're inclined to linger in one spot and look down at the water.

According to information provided by Mary Currie, the Golden Gate Bridge District's public affairs director, 1,005 incident reports relative to suicide were filed between January 1, 2000, and November 22, 2010. Of this total, 274 were confirmed suicides, 59 were unconfirmed suicides, and 672 were people who were stopped by the Bridge Patrol or California Highway Patrol from making an attempt. In some cases the person was approached and talked to before he or she got a leg over the railing. Other times the person already was on the other side, standing on the chord and deliberating about whether to jump. In these instances, officers may spend hours trying to coax the person back to safety. When I talk with Captain Lisa Locati, who heads bridge security, she says that the longest intervention she remembers in her thirty-three years on the job lasted seven-and-a-half hours.

There's no particular model or method that officers use to talk to a potential jumper. Initially, the officer approaches, makes contact, and asks questions to confirm intent. After that, it's about helping the person find reasons to live—or at least choose not to die in the moment. Locati starts by saying, “Hi, my name is Lisa. I received a report of [or someone noticed] you acting like you might be preparing to jump. Is that true? Are you thinking about committing suicide?” After that, Locati says, “You lie, you do whatever you need to do to talk the person back [to safety].”