The Golden Gate Bridge, a popular landmark that has become notorious for suicide incidences for many decades now, may soon no longer be a place where people can end their despair as officials finally approved to put up anti-suicide steel nets to be completed by 2018.
The Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District authorities voted unanimously and approved the efforts to mitigate the growing number of people jumping to their deaths at the Golden Gate.
The approved project for the anti-suicide nets called Golden Gate Bridge Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project is worth $76 million, of which $50 million to be covered by the federal government and the remaining by state and local funding.
“Where nets have been erected as suicide barriers they've proven to be 100% effective thus far," said CEO and general manager Denis Mulligan of the Transportation District. "Suicidal people have stopped jumping at those locations."
The nets will be made of steel cable 20-feet beneath the west and east edges of the Golden Gate. The anti-suicide nets intend to either discourage people from jumping or to catch them should they jump.
Mulligan said barriers were proven effective at the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington and Clifton Suspension Bridge in England, dramatically lowering the suicide rates.
Latest record from the Bridge Rail Foundation shows there have been around 1,600 deaths and with suicides recorded as frequently occurring at 10 attempts per month. Such statistics have placed the bridge as the second most-used suicide location in the world, and the most-used in the U.S. The Foundation is a non-government organization that aims to stop suicides from the famous bridge.
Many supporters—mostly families and friends of suicide victims—expressed their joy over the recent approval of the project, regardless of the debate and criticisms the efforts have received in the past. Some opponents of the barriers argued that the barriers will reduce the beauty of the Golden Gate. Others, meanwhile, said it is not the fault of the bridge if people decide to take their life there, and that people will always find other ways to do so even if the Bridge will be placed with barriers.
A medical director at the department of psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital dispelled the belief that people would go to other sites when their attempts seem to be prevented by such barriers.
"We have scientific evidence of that," Dr. Mel Blaustein said.
Meanwhile, a study [pdf] by University of California researcher Richard Seiden reveals that people who are talked out of committing suicide very rarely continue to have the urge to do so. In fact, over 90 percent of them remained alive decades thereafter. The study titled Where Are They Now? A Follow-up Study of Suicide Attempters from the Golden Gate Bridge was published in 1978.
