A suicide barrier at Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto, from which at least 400 people have leapt to their death, might have served only to make jumpers go elsewhere, Canadian doctors suggested Wednesday.
Until 2003, when the slender steel-rod barrier known as the “luminous veil” was constructed, the bridge saw almost 10 suicides per year, second only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
“The Bloor Street Viaduct has been a notorious suicide magnet for almost a century,” said Dr. Mark Sinyor of the University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, who led the new study. “The hope was that when the barrier went up you would see a decrease in overall suicides by jumping.”
Several bridges and public buildings worldwide have already installed suicide barriers, including the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. These measures seem to be effective locally, but it is unclear whether in reality they just move the problem elsewhere.
Sinyor and a colleague used coroner records from 1993 to 2007 to test if the “luminous veil” had made a dent in the city’s suicide statistics.
Since the barrier went up, they found, there hadn’t been a single suicide at the Bloor Street Viaduct. But the number of jumps from other bridges in Toronto had gone up from 8.7 to 14.2 per year, leaving the total number of suicides by jumping constant at about 56.
In the same period, suicides by other means declined from about 200 to 170, set against Toronto’s population of 2.4 million in 1993.
Although it isn’t clear from the data why the barrier failed to impact suicide rates, the obvious explanation is that jumpers simply go somewhere else, Sinyor said.
The Bloor Street Viaduct is easily accessed and highly lethal with its 100-foot drop to two roads below, the researchers note in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). But apart from that, there is nothing special about it.
The same may not be true for cultural icons like the Golden Gate Bridge, which has witnessed at least 1,300 suicides.
“The Golden Gate Bridge has these iconic vistas, these sweeping landscapes,” said Dr. Mel Blaustein, president of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California, who was not involved in the new study.
Studies of people who survived suicide attempts at the bridge show that the vast majority wouldn’t go elsewhere, Blaustein said. He has been pushing for a suicide barrier for years and said a net suspended under the bridge had already been approved, but lacked funding.
While he said he was surprised by the new findings, he called the Bloor Street Viaduct “a very ugly bridge” and said it might not be comparable to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The authors of a related editorial in BMJ note that efforts to curb suicide rates might be aimed at other areas. “From a population perspective, with the exception of city states, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, jumping is a relatively rare (<10% total) method of suicide; deaths from specific hotspots are fewer still," wrote David Gunnell from the University of Bristol, UK, and Matthew Miller from Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.
"If the ultimate goal of means restriction is to reduce the incidence of suicide, the most promising targets are therefore not hot spots, important as these may be, but methods that are commonly used, highly lethal, and readily accessible in or near the home (such as toxic pesticides in developing counties and firearms in the United States)."
Sinyor said that, despite his findings, the "luminous veil" had achieved an important goal.
"It completely eliminated a popular suicide magnet," he said, noting that it also protected people traveling beneath the bridge.
And even if the barrier didn't directly deter suicide jumpers, he said, "it sends a message to the population in Toronto that we care about suicide."
SOURCE: BMJ, online July 7, 2010.
