Dying in Public
Initial reports of another ferry shutdown were met with the usual shrugs and sighs of resignation by those of us who must rely on the system, much to our frequent disappointments. As the day unfolded and more and more sailings were cancelled, rumours swirled and finally solidified. Someone was balanced on the railing of the boat which had docked and unloaded earlier, and it was looking more and more like a public suicide attempt. After a 7 hour stand-off, the distraught male asked for a Coke and when negotiators rolled it across the deck to him, and he reached for it, they tasered him, and took him down, presumably to hospital.
Why do some people choose highly public places to end their lives while others retreat to their homes or various non-public places? A 2024 Australian study [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11977852/] dissected 42,656 suicides which had occurred over 17 years. Without belabouring the details of what was deemed public versus private space, the study found one quarter of all suicides occurred in public places, almost 70% at home and 5.4% in inpatient wards or correctional facilities.
Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What’s also interesting is the comparison of death by suicide against attempted suicides. Public locations tend to be great heights, train or subway tracks, or other high fatality choices so the proportion of “successful” public suicides is higher. Most public suicide locations are high-lethality but also present the opportunity for public intervention, official or otherwise.
Jumping from great heights such as the Golden Gate bridge, or other tall structures, accounts for fewer than 10% of total suicides globally although that increases to 24% in New York, 45% in Hong Kong, 60% in Singapore and 70% in San Francisco, thanks to the bridge.
In 1978, Richard Seiden conducted an important study of 515 people who were physically restrained from jumping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971, and found that roughly 94% had not died by suicide at follow-up. Despite this, all attempts to target harden the bridge failed because the thinking continued to be, “they’ll just go somewhere else”. In fact, they didn’t go somewhere else, nor did the vast majority commit suicide.
Many years went by before netting was installed around the Golden Gate in 2024 and the results are pretty compelling [https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/through-the-fire/202601/the-golden-gate-bridge-net-is-saving-lives]. Since the bridge opened in 1937, it averaged about 30 deaths by suicide per year. Since the net was installed two years ago, there have been only 12.
The word, net, implies something fun and bouncy but it’s determinedly not. The design is an intentional deterrent on multiple levels. It’s marine-grade stainless steel, very taut and tightly woven — the bridge’s General Manager described it as “jumping onto a cheese grater.”
The bridge is one of those sites which draw people to carry out, or attempt, their suicide and that contagion aspect is well documented. But researchers like David Lester write about a symbolic dimension: certain sites carry cultural weight as thresholds, liminal spaces between one state and another. A ferry is the connection between two shores, almost too on-the-nose.
Is it a cry for help?
The many people who study suicide, as a mental health issue, as a public health issue, and as a behavioural inspiration, have moved away from categorizing suicide attempts as either a cry for attention or a real attempt to end a life. They still say some acts are intrapsychic, intended to end real pain, and others are mostly interpersonal, aimed at being witnessed, heard or responded to. The difference is that most suicide attempts are both, with ambivalence being the common denominator.
Thomas Joiner, whose own father committed suicide, has an Interpersonal Theory of Suicide [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_theory_of_suicide] which theorizes that suicidal desire arises from two converging states: thwarted belongingness (profound disconnection, the sense of being outside human community) and perceived burdensomeness (the belief that one’s death would benefit others). The capability for suicide — the acquired ability to override the self-preservation instinct — is a third element.
Certainly the man on the BC ferry railing was demonstrating thwarted belonging by demanding witness to his disconnection. When he shut down a major transportation hub for seven hours, affecting hundreds of strangers, and commanding a full emergency response he finally became visible in a way he wasn’t before. Maybe.
Where Joiner’s work [https://www.psychologytools.com/articles/profile-thomas-joiner-and-the-study-of-suicide] becomes controversial is his estimate that 40% of the tendency to suicide is genetic, based on fear and pain processing, both of which are genetically predisposed.
In an interview he said:
The novel part of the model is trying to explain why it is that some people carry those thoughts forward into behavior. And there is where the third factor kicks in. That one has to do with what we've named The Capacity for Suicide. That capacity is made up of things like being fearless about death, being fearless about physical injury.Being fearless in general, just a fearless character, but also of things like pain tolerance. People have high pain tolerance or unafraid of physically painful things. And then a third aspect of that capacity idea has to do with practical knowledge. Do you know how to operate something like a weapon, for instance?
Psychiatrist Erwin Stengel’s 1958 monograph Attempted Suicide: Its Social Significance and Effects is cited as the first to identify what he called the “appeal function” of suicidal behavior as a coherent psychiatric concept. He wrote:
There is a social element in the pattern of most suicidal attempts. Once we look out for the element we find it without difficulty in most cases... In most attempted suicides we can discover an appeal to other human beings.
And it turns out, some human beings do respond, and the response can be positive. A more recent study in the UK [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6887022/] pursued interviews with people who had been talked “off the ledge” by a stranger, and those who had taken it upon themselves to intervene when they saw someone in crisis. What both groups reported was a profound sense of dissociation, being “in a bubble” while in the process of deciding to jump. A passerby becoming involved effectively burst the bubble and reconnected the person with the world.
Here’s a bit from that study’s summary:
This is the first empirical study to examine the role of passing strangers in preventing suicides in public places. It shows that no specialist skills are needed. Interveners were ordinary people, distinguished only by a high level of social awareness, combined with a readiness for social action. The findings also suggest that people do not need a script and should not be afraid of saying ‘the wrong thing.’ What interveners said was much less important than how they made the suicidal person feel, namely safe, connected and validated (‘I matter’). Interveners did this simply by being themselves, responding with authenticity, calmness and compassion.
The strangers who intervened were the exception, sadly, and not the norm. Some years ago I reported on a “bridge jumper” as we called them in the newsroom, on the Ironworkers bridge in North Vancouver. Once police were on scene and traffic had come to a complete standstill, people came out of their cars and began cat-calling and exhorting the individual to jump.
This behaviour even has a label, it’s called baiting behaviour or the “jump” phenomenon, studied by a guy named Leon Mann who listed the conditions under which crowds change from passive bystanders to active provocateurs. The crowd anonymity allows people to behave in ways they would not exhibit if they were alone.
The UK intervention study also highlights an important cultural assumption. All our “Western” interventions, including engaging a stranger in distress, focus on the individual, that the person in distress wants to be seen as an individual seeking help and that connection to others is stabilizing and reassuring. In Eastern cultures identity is derived from social affiliations and responsibilities, collectivist compared to Western culture, which is characterized as individualistic. So shame and honour, and loss of face, is seen as a burden to the family or even the community.
Like much research, including medical research into the effects of medication, some groups are most frequently studied, to the detriment of others who receive the medicine. For example, cardiac medication given to women which has been exclusively tested in men.
Research literature now uses the acronym WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — to describe the populations on which most psychology research, including suicidology, is based. As a result, the prevention strategies, and even the understanding of the motivations, may have very little to do with what goes in in different cultures.
For example, Korea has the highest suicide rate among OECD countries, yet its research on suicidal behaviours [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5714711/] has been described as primitive.
A January 2026 paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12891080/] calls for a paradigm shift toward “cultural grounding”.
From the introduction to the paper:
Suicide represents one of the most pressing public health crises of our time, claiming over 700,000 lives annually (1 [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12891080/#B1]). It is a global phenomenon that transcends borders, age groups, and socioeconomic strata, necessitating robust prevention strategies worldwide. However, a significant disparity exists in the global mental health landscape: while 77% of global suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries, the theoretical frameworks, assessment tools, and evidence-based interventions designed to prevent them are overwhelmingly products of high-income, Western societies (2 [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12891080/#B2], 3 [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12891080/#B3]). This discrepancy raises important questions about the cross-cultural efficacy of standard prevention models when applied to populations with vastly different social ontologies.
The East Asian region, which bears a heavy suicide burden, serves as a critical context for examining these challenges
Private lethality
People who die in private, at home or office, alone, using methods which are highly lethal, show different profiles than the public attempts, and this information comes from what’s termed psychological autopsy, something we all indulge in after hearing about the self-inflicted death of someone we knew.
Was there long standing depression, social withdrawal, previous planning or discussion with less ambivalence? What could we have done to prevent this tragedy? Another thinker in the field is Edwin Shneidman [https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/suicide-psychache-and-alienation] who coined the term psychache to describe unbearable psychological pain which leads to suicidal behaviour. The psychache is a symptom and there is no audience required because the goal is to end the pain, not communicate it.
The response gap
I started out wanting to understand what motivates public suicide attempts versus private ones. What I’ve found is that the distinction itself may be a cultural construct at its heart. Here in the west, private suicide is a determined act, even when there is some ambivalence (most self-poisonings are done in private but most don’t succeed), while in eastern societies public suicides are more determined, not as an attempt to connect but rather as a social statement. In both cases the audience is the point.
The man on the railing at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal and the man on a Korean bridge may both be in public, but they may be doing entirely different things.
The uncomfortable question underneath all of this: what does it say about our mental health systems and community that someone must shut down a ferry terminal to receive seven hours of undivided attention? Private death wishes go largely unnoticed until it’s too late; the public act generates massive, costly, and ultimately clumsy responses. Neither outcome reflects a system that’s working.
The crowd that shouts “just jump” is a third failure — the community response that actively withdraws the very witness and connection the person on the railing was seeking. If the man on the railing is asking for recognition that his life matters, that crowd behaviour comes as a resounding message that he matters less than does their inconvenience.
For music today, here’s Rick Astley’s 1991 release of “A Cry for Help”.
Until next time, don’t be the one who yells, “jump”; be the one who helps.
Thanks for reading Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load! This post is public so feel free to share it.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe [https://joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]
Comentarios
0Sé la primera persona en comentar
¡Regístrate ahora y únete a la comunidad de Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load Podcast!