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Originally Posted by Toronto Life Magazine
In some notable ways, people who choose to commit suicide in the subway are a breed apart. The subway is one of the only violent means of suicide that women are as apt to use as men. (Suicidal women tend to prefer pills and cutting themselves, while men prefer more deadly means, such as guns.) Paul Links, a professor of psychiatry and the chair of suicide studies at the University of Toronto, has studied suicidal behaviour on subway systems around the world and proposes that subways are a draw to people who impulsively commit suicide, for the simple reason that they are convenient. His theory is backed up by a Montreal study that found most people attempt suicides at the subway station closest to home. “A characteristic of a suicidal state of mind is that planning is affected,” Links says. “A suicidal person isn’t thinking, ‘Well, I have six options, so if this doesn’t work, I’ll try another method.’ ” If you can prevent a person committing suicide by one method, he says, the crisis may pass, and so may the desire to die.
Most deaths occur during lunch hour. The highest concentration is on the Yonge line, between Bloor and Sheppard
The convenience theory undermines critics of subway barriers, who believe that a suicidal person who encounters such a barrier will simply find another place to die. The effect of the suicide barrier installed on the Bloor Street Viaduct seems to support Links’s findings. Between 1918 and 2003, more than 400 people died by jumping from the overpass above the Don Valley; it was second only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge as the most frequently used site for bridge-related suicides in the world. In 2003, the city built the Luminous Veil along both sides of the bridge, ignoring criticism about cost and aesthetics. Since then, no one has died from jumping off the viaduct, and the total number of suicides in the city has dipped from 273 in 2003 to 244 in 2007. Of course, the drop could simply be a statistical anomaly.
Researchers have tried to understand suicidal behaviour by following thwarted subway jumpers and seeing if they re-attempt. One decade-long study undertaken in Britain in the 1980s followed a group of 94 people who had survived a suicide attempt on the London underground. Only seven went on to die from a subsequent suicide (three in the subway). For most of the 94, the desire to die was fleeting. More recently, there was an 11-year study of suicides on the Hong Kong subway system, after the city installed platform barriers. Only some of the stations have barriers, but jumpers didn’t flock to unprotected stations to kill themselves. Instead, fewer people jumped, period. Researchers concluded that not only did the existence of barriers at some stations physically prevent suicides, the barriers “delethalized” the image of the subway system altogether.
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