On Monday a man climbed up the ledge at the end of the Stewart Ave bridge and presumably hung tight to the fencing as he crawled along the bridge, a hundred feet above water. According to the Ithaca Journal, CUPD and psychologists reached him before he was able to throw himself over. They cut a hole in the wiring and lassoed him in.
If this is the determination a suicidal person can have to fall into the gorge, the debate over ‘suicide fences’ just got easier.
It’s hard to know what this man’s initial goal was – whether he was intending to commit suicide, or if he was engaging in some sort of ploy for attention. Since he must have been moving slowly enough for people to see him, report him, and for the authorities to arrive at the scene in time, it’s not completely obvious what was happening. But when assessing the situation, we have no option but to assume he was on the brink of ending his life.
After this unfortunate event, it seems evident that those who want to kill themselves may in fact not be deterred by the presence of the bridge barriers. This has been the argument from ‘anti-fencers’ from the very beginning: that people will find a way to end their lives if they really want to. That argument has now become a reality. It is time that Cornell administrators acknowledge this and seriously re-evaluate the use of the bridge fences. While the barriers may be a step towards preventing spur-of-the-moment suicide leaps, the negative effects of the fences outweigh the benefit of this – now more unlikely – possible preventative method.
For students, the fences remind us every day that our classmates were found at the bottom of the gorge. It tells visitors that the University cages in its students to keep them safe from themselves. They convey the idea that we as students and faculty do not have the capacity to help one another. Among Cornell’s harsh climate, intense academic rigor, and often lacking social interaction, the fences conceal our University’s reassuring natural beauty. Take them down.
“This has been the argument from ‘anti-fencers’ from the very beginning: that people will find a way to end their lives if they really want to.”
Sure, but this still doesn’t prove that the fences have not prevented impulsive suicides. And I don’t think even the administration was ever arguing that the fences would stop someone determined to jump. In some sense this incident is meaningless in terms of providing evidentiary support for/against the fences; we all knew someone could climb over them if he/she wanted to.
Dennis is right. There’s no proper counterfactual. You can say “there would have been more suicides had the fences not been put up” or you can say “there would have been fewer suicides had the fences not been put up,” and no one can contradict you because we can never observe the world in the case “where the fences had not been put up.” Probably the best you can do is assume things would have continued as they had been before. But (i) “how things were” is not necessarily obvious because it’s hard to tell what’s an anomaly and what is a genuine trend, and (ii) there is no compelling reason we ought to actually believe that the suicide rate is constant other than that it’s convenient to do so.
So really any “suicide policy” the administration enacts is immune from criticism. How reassuring! Although I’ll say I also wish they’d be taken down.
Yes, you’re both right, obviously this incident does not provide any indication of how many suicides may have been prevented by the fences (one could possibly even make the case that Monday’s event was successfully preventative, and use it to lobby for the fences).
As far as the statement that ‘we all knew someone could climb over if they wanted to,’ I’m not sure that is entirely true. Not in the sense that most people entertained the idea, but that it was merely a possible situation that was put forward as a hypothetical argument. My point is that this is now a reality and something that needs to be weighed heavily in the fence debate.