Why not both haha. But yes I agree. 2k people killing themselves off this since it's open is insane

Mental health care, but also better wealth distribution/quality of living for everyone.

Wait you're telling me this isn't what they meant by safety nets??

I'm pretty sure California is in the process of implementing its own state-funded healthcare system.

It's the way to do it, just like with legalizing drugs.

For real. It would be interesting to see the average financial depth of the people who attempt suicide in the US.

Curious since I'm not familiar, how do the awnings prevent this? I went to SF a few years ago and there was a giant pile of human shit every 4 blocks so I'm not too surprised.

Stainless steel can be woven into a net that would break the fall, I don't know if that's how it works but it would be possible.

I just read a guardian article about it, it's actually kind of fucked up:

The nets are meant to deter people from jumping and to curb the death rate of those who still attempt to jump, though they will likely be badly injured.

“It’s stainless-steel wire rope netting, so it’s like jumping into a cheese grater,” Dennis Mulligan, the general manager of the bridge district, told the Associated Press. “It’s not soft. It’s not rubber. It doesn’t stretch. We want folks to know that if you come here, it will hurt if you jump.”

Notice it says CURB the death rate, which sounds like they anticipate some people will still die? Jesus ffs.

Ok, I feel dark for making this meme.

But golden gate doesn't have anything inherent that pushes people to commit suicide.

Don't be so sure about that. Check out some of this research.

Believe it or not, reducing access to lethal means actually reduces the number of deaths by suicide, and we have robust data to back this up.

"Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/

We ALSO need to improve people's material conditions and provide better mental health care. But even in societies with strong social safety nets, people still die by suicide. Reducing access to lethal means will reduce deaths, giving people time and opportunity to access any social safety net that exists.

There's one particularly fascinating case study out of Washington state:

"Running perpendicular to the Ellington Bridge, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below - about 125 feet - it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.

After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan...had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.

Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for."

And you know why twice as many people jumped off the Ellington vs. the Taft bridge in the first place? Because the railings on the Taft were slightly higher and therefore harder to scale.

I don't know if this article is paywalled or how to fix that, but it also contains details of a specific study conducted on people who intended to, but didn't jump off the Golden Gate bridge specifically. The absurdity of how minor an obstacle was required to prevent their deaths is amazing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html

People actually travel to San Fran specifically to jump off that bridge because it is iconic.

I mean, there's a solution that doesn't involve altering the landmark, but would those people support actually fixing the problem?

Ensuring people's basic needs are met and they have access to mental health support is a lot more difficult than putting an unsightly band-aid on the problem.

every barrier helps, most suicide attempts are impulse decisions. forcing people to jump 30 feet into a net before they can jump a lethal distance makes it that much harder to follow through.

Think of the first fall as a "proof of concept". If after falling ~20 feet to a chain link fence, you still feel like dragging your injured self to the edge of the fence to finish the job, then it's highly unlikely anything will stop you from killing yourself. The fence is kind of a "try before you buy" thing.

Might be intentional. If it was closer/less of a drop, it might just become "another handrail" where the "oh shit I don't want to do this" doesn't happen until after you jump off the net. By making it such a big drop, you increase the chances of that realization happening first, and if the net causes an injury, that might also stop the person from making it to the edge of the net and going over.

Basically, by making it a big drop it's become a bigger obstacle, which could increase effectiveness.