Page 122 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

a mess (which women in particular will try to avoid).…Deaths by hanging, asphyxiation, or
drowning all usually demand more planning, while more courage would be needed with the more
violent methods of shooting, cutting, stabbing, crashing one’s car, and jumping off high places or
in front of trains or buses.
There is something awfully matter-of-fact about that paragraph, isn’t there? Nowhere in Clarke’s
article does he speak empathetically about the suicidal, or dwell on the root causes of their pain. He
analyzes the act the way an engineer would look at a mechanical problem. “The whole idea wasn’t
very popular at all amongst psychiatrists and social workers,” Clarke remembers:
They thought it was very superficial, that these people were so upset and demoralized that it was
sort of insulting to think you could deal with it by simply making it harder to commit suicide. I
got quite a lot of pushback here and there from people about that idea. 3
This simply isn’t the way we talk about suicide. We act as if the method were irrelevant. When
gas was first introduced into British homes in the 1920s, two government commissions were created
to consider the new technology’s implications. Neither mentioned the possibility that it might lead
to increased suicides. When the official British government report on the gas-modernization
program came out in 1970, it stated that one of the positive side effects of the transition to natural
gas would be a decline in fatal accidents. It didn’t even mention suicide—even though the number
of people who killed themselves deliberately with gas dwarfed the number who died from it
accidentally. In 1981, the most comprehensive academic work on the subject, A History of the
British Gas Industry, was published. It goes into extraordinary detail about every single aspect of
the advent and growth of gas heating and gas stoves in English life. Does it mention suicide, even in
passing? No.
Or consider the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Since it opened in
1937, it has been the site of more than 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many
people take their lives in that period. 4
What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big
difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping, or a net was installed to catch them before
they fell. The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn’t go on to jump off
something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.

Sure enough, this is exactly what seems to be the case, according to a very clever bit of detective
work by psychologist Richard Seiden. Seiden followed up on 515 people who had tried to jump
from the bridge between 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained. Just 25 of those 515
persisted in killing themselves some other way. Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off
the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that
given moment.
So when did the municipal authority that runs the bridge finally decide to install a suicide
barrier? In 2018, more than eighty years after the bridge opened. As John Bateson points out in his
book The Final Leap, in the intervening period, the bridge authority spent millions of dollars
building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been
killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate Bridge. It spent millions building a median to separate
north- and southbound traffic, on the grounds of “public safety.” On the southern end of the bridge,
the authority put up an eight-foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Fort
Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protective net was even installed during
the initial construction of the bridge—at enormous cost—to prevent workers from falling to their
deaths. The net saved nineteen lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more
than eighty years.
Now, why is this? Is it because the people managing the bridge are callous and unfeeling? Not at
all. It’s because it is really hard for us to accept the idea that a behavior can be so closely coupled to
a place. Over the years, the bridge authority periodically asked the public to weigh in on whether it
supported the building of a suicide barrier. The letters generally fell into two categories: Those in
favor tended to be people whose loved ones had committed suicide, who had some understanding of
the psychology of the suicidal. The balance—in fact, the majority—simply dismissed the idea of
coupling out of hand.
Here is a small sample: