Many people are ambivalent when it comes to suicide. Often they leave it up to others or fate to decide the outcome.
A young man, heavily medicated and despondent, walks on the pedestrian side of the Golden Gate Bridge. “If one person smiles at me,” he writes in a note that he leaves on his dresser, “I won’t jump.” The coroner finds the note in the man’s sparsely furnished apartment after his suicide. [1]
Behind the closed door of her bedroom, a teenage girl swallows a handful of pills. She doesn’t know whether it’s a lethal amount, but accepts whatever may happen because she is tired of hurting. If someone finds her in time, she will wake up in a hospital bed, no better off than she was before, but no worse off, either. If she doesn’t wake up, her pain will be over.
Several boys play Russian roulette with a loaded gun that one boy stole from his father. It’s a daring game of chance with potentially fatal consequences. None of the boys is particularly eager to die, but they have been sharing a bottle, come from broken homes, face futures that appear bleak, and don’t see much point to living.
In 1975, a San Francisco psychiatrist named David Rosen interviewed six survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps. Rosen admitted that it was a small sample, but then few people have lived after leaping from the bridge. Rosen found that all six had several things in common. Each was young—under 30 and in most cases closer to 20. Each hit the water feet first and at a slight angle so that their bodies arced back to the surface, which prevented them from drowning. Most important of all, each one said that he or she wanted to live as soon as they went over the side. Moreover, they didn’t have a Plan B; it was the Golden Gate Bridge or nothing. [2]
Thinking that people who display suicidality want to die is a way of writing them off before it happens, as if they merit no further consideration. “Jump!” some observers shout to the man perched on the ledge of a tall building. Get it over with. It’s a cruel thing to say, and something that doubtless wouldn’t be said if the man was someone they knew and cared about. The fact that he is a stranger makes what happens to him irrelevant to many in the crowd. They share a degree of fascination in his plight, and wonder what it was that led him to the ledge, but often that is all.
Thinking that a person wants to die often serves as justification for doing nothing about it. If a person believes that someone who is suicidal can’t be talked out of it, or that it’s their life and they can do whatever they want with it—including ending it—then intervention seems pointless. Just go about your business and let others worry about theirs with no thought or interference.
Whenever life becomes unbearable, death is an option—but this doesn’t mean that a person willingly chooses to die. Even people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness rarely resort to suicide. [3] Humans aren’t wired that way. From an early age, we are taught to resist death as long as possible. “It beats the alternative” is a common remark when someone comments on the tribulations of aging: Life may be challenging, but dying is worse.
If we are hurting, we want the pain to go away, and the sharper and deeper it is the more we want to be free of it. Should it get really bad, death not only seems like a viable alternative but, in some instances, the only option. This still doesn’t mean that people want to die, though. Rather, they don’t want to live, at least the way they are living at this moment. Anything—even death—is thought to be better.
