Would a Suicide Barrier on the Golden Gate Save Lives?

seemed determined to end her life at the Golden Gate Bridge—an international icon and the world’s No. 1 site for suicide.

The 15-year-old San Ramon Valley High School student searched for directions to the bridge on her computer. On Monday morning, she apparently rode her mountain bike nine miles from her Danville home to the Dublin BART station and took a train to San Francisco’s Embarcadero station, where a BART security camera snapped a photo of her wheeling her bike through the exit gates.

It looks like she rode the bike eight miles or so to Fort Point and locked it to a parking lot rack, leaving her helmet beside it. She was seen on the bridge about 10 a.m. Monday but wasn’t seen leaving it,

The bridge walkway is edged by a 4-foot-high rail. It stands 220 feet above San Francisco Bay. A fall at that height lasts four seconds, and a person usually dies after hitting the water at about 75 mph.

At this point, nothing has been made public about Bayliss’ state of mind in the months, weeks, days and hours leading to her apparent leap.

But if the bridge weren’t there, would the teen have considered taking her life? If it wasn’t so easy for her to walk onto the bridge and jump because no safety barriers are in place, would she have tried other means?

And did her age and apparently high-functioning life in an affluent suburb contribute to her vulnerability to an impulsive yet final and destructive act?

A Walnut Creek-based expert on suicide and people in crisis and the author of a soon-to-be-published book about Golden Gate Bridge suicides said he cannot comment directly on the case. But John Bateson and other advocates for a suicide barrier contend that many of the 1,550 confirmed suicides at the bridge since it opened in 1937 could have been prevented if the bridge had a barrier in place.

Bateson, the executive director of the Contra Costa Crisis Center, cites evidence in his book, The Final Leap, that disputes the commonly held notion that people would just find other ways to kill themselves if the bridge weren't an option.

“It’s grand and it’s glorious,” he said, explaining the allure of one of the world’s great architectural wonders to people in a spiral of self-destructive anguish.“You may have felt isolated and alone in life but in death you’re joining this whole society of people in pain and in their exit strategy.”

He said that most Bay Area residents know of someone who has died jumping off the bridge and that most victims are from the nine Bay Area counties. 

Moreover, teenagers like Bayliss, who was on her high school’s junior varsity swim team and was said by San Ramon Valley Unified School District officials to be doing well academically, are often at the greatest risk of suicide.

“One of the myths of youth suicide is that it’s the kids in trouble, using and abusing alcohol or drugs who are most at risk,” Bateson said. “The most at-risk are the so-called ‘good’ kids, the straight-A students who have never failed a test or had someone break up with them. They haven’t developed the coping skills so that when something happens, it takes on an even greater significance. … And, teenagers, there are so many emotional issues around that time. Loved ones may not be able to distinguish between what is typical teen angst and what are signs of serious indications of suicidal intent.”

Suicidal people typically don’t want to die, they just want their anguish to end. Using an analogy to explain suicidal thinking, Bateson tells people to think about what it’s like to slam a door on a finger. “The pain is immediate and takes over everything in the body,” he said. “You’re not thinking about anything else. That’s an analogy for talking about people who are suicidal.”

About 30 people commit suicide each year on the bridge and 70 attempt it. Bateson said it is “appalling” that there has been so little political will, notably by the Golden Gate bridge district, to erect a barrier. The CHP first asked bridge authorities to install safety fencing on the bridge in 1939. The roster of victims includes young children — one as young as 2 — who were thrown off the bridge by suicidal parents who then jumped after them. 

“They take precautions for people who are physically disabled, and they put up bike barriers, even though there has never been a bicycle fatality, but they don’t take steps to make the bridge safe for people who are mentally ill,” Bateson said.

He noted that the bridge district is spending money to refurbish its visitors' center for the bridge’s 75th  anniversary in 2012, but it has yet to secure any of the $45 million it would cost to erect a suicide “net” it approved in 2008.  The metal net would hang 20 feet below the bridge railings, supported by steel ribs and suspended beneath the walkways on both sides of the bridge, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. 

A bridge district statement said it has not secured funding and that it is against board policy to use bridge tolls to pay for the net.

Paul Muller, a board member of Bridge Rail Foundation, an all-volunteer organization made up of family members of bridge suicide victims and mental health, legal and public affairs professionals, said the district has not even obtained final engineering drawings. His is the only group actively seeking funding for the net. 

Top bridge officials have told Bateson that any kind of barrier is probably five years or more away. Yes, the cost is high, but he said it would be a one-time cost. 

Another major argument from barrier opponents is that it could ruin the Art Deco structure’s aesthetics and spectacular views. Many don't want to acknowledge that one of the nation’s great tourist attractions has such a lethal history.

Finally, there is the commonly held idea that people who want to kill themselves will find some way to do it. That is, if Plan A — jumping off the bridge — won’t work, they'll go to Plan B, Bateson said.

Myth: They'll Find a Way Anyway

He said that idea runs counter to numerous studies on suicide and on people who have considered ending their lives at the bridge, as well as research on well-known landmarks around the world that have erected suicide barriers and have eliminated suicides and attempted suicides.

In 1978, U.C. Berkeley psychology professor Richard Seiden published a study that asked, “Will a person who is prevented from suicide in one location inexorably tend to attempt and commit suicide elsewhere?” He and his graduate students tracked down 515 people who had attempted suicide at the bridge. Twenty-five years later, 94 percent were still alive or had died by means other than suicide. Only 6 percent had taken their lives.

Seiden concluded that people who are fixated on killing themselves also fixate on the method. “They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B,” Seiden told the New York Times Magazine, according to Bateson. “They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to shoot myself.’ ”

In his book, Bateson cited several examples of bridges and other structures that had been magnets for suicidal people until barriers were erected. 

“The bridge experience, as reported in Maine, Washington, D.C., Canada, the U.K., Australia and elsewhere is the same,” the Rail Foundation’s website said. “Restrict easy access and lives are saved.”

The number of suicides at the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., plummeted to one five years after an 8-foot-high suicide fence was constructed in 1986. The fence went up following the deaths of 24 people between 1979 and 1985 and after three suicides in a 10-day period. Bateson noted that there was no subsequent increase in the number of suicides from the nearby Taft Bridge, which doesn’t have a barrier.

In 2005, Bateson said, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of suicide prevention strategies and concluded that the two most effective ways to save people's lives are to restrict access to lethal means—such as spectacular bridges from which to jump —and to train health-care professionals to recognize warning signs and to intervene.

Restricting access to “lethal means” allows time for the suicidal person to reach out, call a suicide prevention hot line, or for others to spot warning signs and intervene, said the state Department of Mental Health’s 2008 “Strategic Plan on Suicide Prevention." That time can allow for the self-destructive impulse to subside while the person receives treatment, the plan said. 

That's been the experience of a significant majority of the 32 people who are known to have survived Golden Gate Bridge jumps, Bateson said. Only three subsequently committed suicide.

The survivors include two teenagers who jumped from the bridge in March and April and were immediately rescued by people surfing and sailing nearby. One was a 17-year-old Windsor boy who jumped in front a stunned group of classmates. He boasted to classmates on the bus ride to San Francisco that he was going to jump "for kicks."

In April, a 16-year-old Southern California girl was rescued by former Walnut Creek Mayor Merle Hall and his son Eric Hall and grandsons, who live in Alamo. They had been out sailing. 

Another survivor is Kevin Hines, who visited San Ramon Valley High last week to tell his story and spread awareness that “suicide is never the solution to any problem.”

As he told his story about surviving a suicide attempt when he was a teen by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, many students were reduced to tears. It's not known whether Bayliss was in the audience, said school district spokesman Terry Koehne. 

Hines, through his publicist, declined to comment for this article, saying "the attention should not be on him but the community and its grief." Bateson disputed the idea that talking about suicide "plants" the idea in someone's mind. 

"This same fear isn’t raised in regards to (talking about) drinking, drugs, smoking or unprotected sex," said Bateson, whose book will be published early next year. "In those cases it’s presumed that talking about the problem helps bring it out in the open where it can be addressed. Suicide is different, though. It’s so taboo that people don’t want to acknowledge it, much less discuss it."