Lessons from patients
Two former patients of mine ended their lives by suicide from the Golden Gate. P, a solitary and lonely man in his 50s, was referred to me by his neighbor, Q, one of my long-term patients. P had a history of repeated assessments for lifelong depression, with minimal follow-up. I made a treatment plan with P that we hoped would address both his depression and his reluctance to engage with mental health professionals. He did not return for his follow-up appointment and ignored all my attempts to contact him.
P continued to have intermittent contact with Q. A decade after I had evaluated him, P was finally hospitalized for depression. Since P had no local family or friends, he asked Q to pick him up from the hospital at the time of his discharge. P asked Q to drive him to the Golden Gate Bridge, ostensibly to relish his release by partaking of the panoramic view of San Francisco from the bridge. They parked in the lot at the north end of the bridge, where Q stayed with the car at the vista point. The last that anyone saw of P was when Q noticed him walking on the bridge; nobody saw him go over and his body was not recovered.
In contrast to my brief connection with P, I worked with S over the course of 8 years to deal with her very severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and associated depression, which destroyed jobs and friendships, and estranged her from her family. She moved to Hawaii in hopes of “starting over with less baggage,” but I received a few phone calls over the next few years detailing suicide attempts, including driving her car off a bridge. Floundering in life, she returned to San Francisco and was hospitalized with suicidal ideation. The inpatient team sedated her heavily, ignored her past treatments and diagnoses, and discharged her after several days. Within a day of discharge, S’s sister called to say that S’s body had been recovered from the water below the bridge.
Dr. John Kruse
I don’t think that suicide was inevitable for either P or S, but I also lack any indication that either would be alive today had we installed suicide barriers on the Golden Gate years ago. Unless we eliminate access to guns, cars, trains, poisons, ropes, tall buildings and cliffs, people contemplating suicide will have numerous options at their disposal. We are likely to save lives by continuing to find ways to restrict access to means of death that can be used within seconds and have a high degree of lethality, and we should persist with such efforts. Buying a $5 trigger lock for every gun in California, and spending tens of millions on a public service campaign would cost less and may well save more lives than the Golden Gate suicide barrier. Unfortunately, we still possess very limited knowledge regarding which suicide prevention measures have an “impact on actual deaths or behavior.”28
To increase our efficacy in reducing suicide, we need to find better treatments for depression and anxiety. We also need to identify better ways of targeting those most at risk for suicide,29 improve our delivery of such treatments, and mitigate the social factors that contribute to such misery and unhappiness.