It’s a bridge to our tomorrows,
our happiness and sorrows,
it’s a bridge of fate,
the Golden Gate.

—The Bridge: Golden Gate / Noah Griffin
The Official Ballad of the Golden Gate Bridge

A fitting song, if nothing else. The bridge is, once again, in the news:

The West’s signature bridge is the No. 1 destination for suicide in the world. About 20 people a year, or some 1,300 in all, have taken the fatal leap since the bridge opened in 1937.

There have been efforts in the past to drum up support for a barrier, but proposals in the early 1970s and again in 1998 failed amid public controversy and concerns about aesthetics and effectiveness.

The issue grabbed the attention of the public this year after a filmmaker told authorities that he had recorded 19 suicides off the bridge. It has since grown into a Bay Area-wide morality play.

Grieving relatives have inundated district officials with wrenching testimony about their dead loved ones. Meanwhile, opponents have blasted the idea as an unnecessary cost being forced on them by the self-destructive acts of a tiny minority, who, they insist, would simply kill themselves elsewhere if a barrier were built.

Some UC Berkeley Civil Engineering students have come up with designs for the proposed suicide barriers. One of the students weighs in:

“Showing him some of our designs kind of quieted him,” said Stauffer, who also graduated Saturday. “The important thing, really, is that it gets the debate going. It is ultimately society’s decision whether they want to trade their view on the sidewalk for 20 lives a year.”

Meanwhile, a survivor tells his tale to the London Times:

The world’s most popular suicide destination, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, may lose its macabre status after a campaign led by one of the 16 jumpers to have survived the 220ft (67m) fall.
—
Part of this is the work of John Hines, 23, who suffers from bi-polar mood swings and tried to kill himself by jumping from the bridge. He said that he knew that he had made a mistake the moment he catapulted over the 4ft high railing and began his freefall into the water 220ft below. He was 19 at the time.

After a mid-air change of heart, Mr Hines managed to get his body into an upright position and came to under the water, with a fractured ankle and two shattered vertebrae.

Proponents of this plan say they will save at least 20 lives a year. But the fact is, they’ll only be saving 20 people from jumping off the bridge. Who’s to say that they won’t go and find another way? Hines only changed his mind after jumping. If there had been a barrier at the time, he wouldn’t have had a change of heart. And since he still would have been suicidal, he could have found some sleeping pills, or a gun, or whatever. In fact it’s easier to fix things after you’ve jumped off the bridge than after you’ve pulled a trigger. Mr. Hines is proof enough. But if you have your mind set on something, you’ll find a way.

I’m not trying to be cold-hearted. These people obviously need some kind of help. But millions of dollars for something that really won’t do much, isn’t it. Now this is cold:

The official count of suicides from the bridge ended at 997 because of the media interest surrounding the 1,000th recorded jumper. One local radio station offered a case of Snapple drink to the family of the victim.

Though it is “Made from the Best Stuff on Earth”…

For more Berkeley-based suicide blogging, check CalStuff and BeetleBeat.