Suicide Prevention Doors in Shanghai
If you think you can use technology to solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems – Bruce Schneier
Suicide Prevention Doors could be arriving on the TTC Yonge Line as early as 2013 at the cost of millions. For those millions of dollars one would hope that the glass is tinted rose colour because that is the view it will offer its patrons of the world.
Toronto has tried similarly lame approaches to dealing with mental health before. In 2001 Toronto erected a suicide prevention barrier on the Bloor St Viaduct. The effect was to have jumpers move up to the Millwood St. Bridge. It is interesting to note that in the case of suicides, off of a bridge or on the TTC, they are shunned from broadcast in fears of promoting copy cat incidents. Evidently suicidal people are very unimaginative and only commit suicide by using the scheme of another?
The original installation of these devices will only be on the core downtown stations. Adding insult to injury, suicidal people are now thought to be too stupid to figure out how to navigate to an unprotected station. Even if every station, in time, is protected, are the depressed too depressed to gain the motivation to hop a fence and thrust themselves in front of a train which runs outside the tunnel (at street level)? Perhaps armed guards should patrol the fences and if someone attempts suicide, they could… oh… bad plan.
Fancy studies produced by fancy people with fancy sounding degrees reveal that suicide is a spur of the moment thing. These fancy studies reveal that a suicidal person deterred from the moment may reconsider their actions and not repeat the attempt. By analogy heart disease distilled to its essence occurs when the heart stops beating. If we could follow every person around with a defibrillator, we could revive them when the heart fails to beat and hope that this respite would allow the heart to regain its will to beat. This roving defibrillator program would be hugely expensive but would save countless thousands of us from having to worry about the real problem of heart disease… a healthy lifestyle and exercise.
I cannot ascribe to the belief that suicide is a spur of the moment event. To do so is reductionist to an uncaring extreme, neglecting the months and years of trauma and suffering that often precedes the final tragic moment. If the TTC wants to do something more constructive with these funds, it should invest in counseling and access to counseling. The suicide prevention door program is simply an expensive workaday solutions which allow the rest of us to neglect our responsibility to care.
