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(CNN)Since the Golden Gate Bridge was built in San Francisco in
1937, more than 1,600 people have jumped off it and died. The
bridge is one of many sites around the world that are considered
suicide hot spots because people use them frequently to take
their own lives.

A new analysis suggests that several different types of
interventions could help reduce the risk of suicide at these hot
spots, typically bridges, cliffs or other high places.

Jane Pirkis, a professor at Australia's University of Melbourne
in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, and
colleagues in Australia and Hong Kong looked at studies on the
number of suicides before and after interventions were in place
in 18 different hot spots in the United States, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, China and Europe.

The researchers found that installing barriers at bridges and
railway platforms was associated with a reduction in suicide
risk of 93%, and providing signs with help line numbers at these
sites could reduce the risk by 61%.

"These numbers are phenomenal," said Dr. Eric D. Caine, director
of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at
the University of Rochester Medical Center. Caine was not
involved in the new study, but wrote a commentary about it. Both
were published on Wednesday in the journal Lancet.

However, interventions at suicide hot spots will not have a big
impact on the overall suicide rate because they are only
involved in a small percentage of suicides overall, Caine said.
Of the approximately 40,000 people who take their own lives
every year in the United States, most use guns (52%), hanging
(25%) or poisoning (16%), and only a small number jump from a
tall height (2%) or in front of a moving object (1%).

Although it is important to put interventions in place at common
suicide locations, "we have got to have a strategy where fewer
people come to suicide attempts, (because) once someone is
determined to die, it is much harder to intervene," Cain said.
This strategy should be multifaceted and include improving
mental health services and helping people who are abused, he
added.

The authors of the Lancet article urged interventions at suicide
hot spots, "not only to prevent so-called copycat events, but
also because of the effect that suicides at these sites have on
people who work at them, live near them, or frequent them for
other reasons."

The current analysis suggests that three types of strategies can
have big effects: reducing access to the sites, providing
information about getting help and making it easier for another
person to intervene.

Reducing access
One of the most studied interventions for reducing deaths at
suicide hot spots involves reducing access. It was associated
with between 62% and 99% fewer suicide deaths in 10 different
studies.

One of the studies found that Beachy Head, one of the highest
sea cliffs in the United Kingdom, had about 16 suicides a year
in the 1980s and 1990s. But in the months after road access was
blocked in 2001 -- because of concern over an outbreak of foot-
and-mouth disease in animals -- the number dropped to zero. At
the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal, annual suicides
decreased from 10 to 2.6 after the construction of a tall fence.

It is not surprising that these physical barriers help reduce
suicide deaths, said Steven Vannoy, associate professor of
counseling and school psychology at University of Massachusetts
Boston. "If people encounter something that slows them down,
that makes them have to be conscious of what they're doing, that
may psychologically cause them to not do it," he said. People
want to think the suicide will be easy and effective, he added.

Other suicide hot spots where barriers were linked with fewer
suicides were:

• Ellington Bridge in Washington

• Memorial Bridge in Augusta, Maine

• Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto

• Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England

• Canton Hospital in Baden, Switzerland

• Muenster Terrace in Bern, Switzerland

• Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, Australia

• Gap Park in Sydney

• Grafton Bridge in Auckland, New Zealand

• Lawyers Head cliff in Dunedin, New Zealand

• The underground railway system in Hong Kong

The Golden Gate Bridge does not currently have any barriers in
place, although a plan has been approved to build a steel net 20
feet below where people jump. "There is a good reason to believe
it would reduce the number of suicides," Vannoy said.

Offering help
Several studies have looked at the impact of encouraging people
to get help, such as installing signs with numbers for suicide
hotlines and crisis telephones in the hotspot area.

At the Mid-Hudson Bridge in upstate New York, there were five
suicides per year on average in the years before signs and
crisis phones were installed, compared with 2.3 suicides after.

Signs providing numbers for help had similar effects at a car
park in southern England where people would go to poison
themselves on car exhaust.

However, crisis telephones had the opposite effect on the Skyway
Bridge in St. Petersburg, Florida, where 3.7 people per year
took their own lives before phones were installed in 1999,
compared with 8.2 people after. The authors of the analysis
suggest this increase could have been due to a website that
promoted suicides using the bridge, which became popular around
the same time the phones were added.

Patrolling the area
Some sites have stationed police officers on bridges and cliffs
to help intervene in suicide attempts. But studies have only
looked at the effects of these efforts in combination with
installing fences or crisis phones and not on their own.

In a study in Cheung Chau, an island off Hong Kong, programs
that included police patrols as well as phone hotlines were
found to reduce the number of suicides from about 8.7 to 1.7 per
year. The area is considered a suicide hot spot because people
rent holiday apartments where they poison themselves with carbon
monoxide.

Having a person intervene could probably be very effective, but
somebody would have to be present at all times, Vannoy said.
"Just having a witness there can slow somebody down and make
them think about what they're doing," he said, adding that most
people who want to attempt suicide do not want others to see
them.

Having someone patrol a suicide hot spot could be a much less
expensive strategy, and possibly more cost-effective, than
projects like the steel net below the Golden Gate Bridge, Vannoy
said.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/23/health/saving-lives-worlds-suicide-
hot-spots/

Let the dense fucks jump. Cheaper for all of us.
 

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