Content warning: This post discusses suicide and may be distressing for some readers. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the U.S. and Canada, or find local support here. If there is immediate danger, contact emergency services.
If you This finding was from 1978, but I don’t think many of us think this is true:
The author, UC Berkeley public-health researcher Richard Seiden, identified 515 people who had been restrained from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971, and followed what happened to them.
The rather stunning finding is that 452 were still alive years later at the end of the follow-up period. Thirty-one had died of natural causes, and seven from other causes like accidents. Only 25 had died by suicide.
The profound point here is that if the moment of peak desperation is interrupted, most people go on living. Gladwell writes about this in Talking To Strangers. This might seem deeply counterintuitive. If someone really wants to end their life, won’t they just do it the next day, or the next week, or at the next bridge over? Apparently not.
https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/make-it-through-the-worst
I spent years believing that most people, at the point where they would attempt to take their own lives, if they were stopped but not offered more than that, would continue trying. I’d bet many of you thought that was common knowledge.
But what if it’s not true? What if an act that prevented it- a disruption- would turn out to also be a turning point?
The funny thing is, as much as I assumed that was “common knowledge,” it wasn’t what happened to me. I wasn’t interrupted per se, but my attempt didn’t work. Once I knew I was going to survive, I kind of moved on to figure out what came next. The worst moment of my life had passed; I was still here, and that was over.
Would that always be the case? Obviously, no. On the other hand, maybe we could do a lot to curb the number of lives lost if we made it easier to disrupt and harder to take your own life? That’s a very different conversation from the one we’ve been having about suicide prevention. We’d be talking about access to guns and other potential means. We’d talk about active steps someone could take to get through the worst moments as a starting point for healing. We’d talk more about short-term ways to keep someone alive today before we talked about big-picture items like mental health resources.
While we should invest in better mental health resources and solutions, we can also recognize that the priority on someone’s worst day should be to keep them alive. Because that seems to make a difference for a lot of people.