Debate, costs slow construction of suicide barriers on bridges

AKRON, Ohio - The man pulled over and got out of his vehicle, then climbed over the chest-high brown railing with a lighted cigarette in his hand and jumped.

Jeffrey Coleman watched from his yard as the man, flailing his arms and kicking his legs, fell 120 feet to his death.

It was not the first time someone committed suicide in Coleman's urban neighborhood, nestled in a green valley near Akron's All-America bridge, also known as the Y bridge for the way it divides in two at one end.

Coleman thinks a barrier to deter jumpers is long overdue at the bridge where 26 people have committed suicide the last 10 years, including seven in 2006.

In Akron, like other cities where easy-to-climb bridges attract those seeking to end their lives, the effort to construct barriers gets sidetracked by high costs and debates over whether they only cause depressed individuals to choose another way to die.

However, many mental health specialists say barriers deter suicides, and one study suggests that an individual contemplating suicide would not seek another site from which to jump.

Barrier studies are under way at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, where more than 1,200 suicides have occurred since 1937, and in Seattle where 50 people have killed themselves since 1995 by jumping from the Aurora Bridge.

Like Akron's Y bridge, the Aurora Bridge spans a populated area composed of tech companies that have moved in over the last 20 years, along with trendy shops and restaurants. The suicides have traumatized workers.

Although there is strong support for a barrier, finding $5 million for the project is a problem, Hirakawa said.

The bridge has six phones with buttons for 911 or a crisis center, and signs with a suicide hotline number.

"The real change is made when you put up barriers," said psychiatrist Paula Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

A study of the Memorial Bridge in Augusta, Maine, showed there were 14 suicides before a safety fence was installed in 1983. There were no suicides at the bridge after the fence was installed, and the number of suicidal jumps from other structures in the area remained unchanged.

The study's author, Andrew Pelletier, an epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that suicidal individuals did not seek alternative sites for jumping.

When a new deck was put on the Memorial Bridge, city councilors considered not putting the fence back up. Former City Councilor Donna Lerman said the removal of the fence opened up a vista of the city and its capital dome.

She opposed the fence, saying it ruined the view and made people choose another method of taking their lives, including jumping from two other bridges in the city.

"It doesn't get at the crux of the matter, and the fact more people are committing suicides out of despondence in the privacy of their own homes," Lerman said.

Barriers are effective for the majority of people who would take their lives from a bridge, said Richard McKeon, a clinical psychologist and adviser on suicide prevention for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He said only a minority will find another means to kill themselves.

"Most people who die by suicide have some level of ambivalence - they are not 100 percent certain that they want to die," McKeon said. "There's still a chance that if they don't follow the plan they have, they may not follow through and find another."

Coleman, 60, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, says the area has improved in recent years and he does not want it scarred by another suicide. "It traumatizes people," he said. "You have to take the little kids in the house so they don't see things like this."