Suicide isn’t painless

I did want to take a moment before I went home to comment on the recent suicide attempt that has, apparently, been making national headlines (see Suicide attempt draws nation’s attention, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Aug. 30^th; and Commuters’ mood turns ugly as suicide try snarls I-5 traffic, Seattle P-I, Aug. 29^th).

Now normally, suicides — or suicide attempts — aren’t really newsworthy events (unless, of course, they happen to be by some already-noteworthy personality…and even then, I often question if it’s really that newsworthy an occurrence). However, this event has been garnering national media attention not because of the suicide attempt itself, but because of the depressingly horrendous way that people here reacted to it.

In a nutshell, an unidentified woman decided to at least appear to want to commit suicide during the Tuesday morning rush hour. Pulling her car to the side of the Ship Canal bridge, she got out her car and sat on the railing overlooking Lake Union 160 ft. below. Someone called the police who quickly arrived to try and talk her down, but by this point, the mood was already getting ugly. Someone sitting on the edge of a bridge is sure to draw attention, and the arrival of police officers drew more. As traffic was slowed by the gawkers, people frustrated by the slow pace started yelling at the woman, telling her to jump. Eventually, the comments and obscenities from the passing traffic were causing enough problems with the police officers’ negotiations with the woman that they found it necessary to close down I-5, causing a huge traffic jam in the middle of the morning rush.

About two hours later, the woman jumped. Surprisingly enough, she survived the fall into the lake, and was taken to a hospital, where her condition has gone from critical to serious over the past day.

The thing that gets me about all of this — and what has been getting to many people — is how horrendously people acted. When I-5 was closed down, it was not closed down because of the possible jumper. It was closed down because so many people felt that they had to insult and verbally abuse an obviously already distraught woman, to the point of purportedly yelling, “Jump, bitch, jump!” as they drove by. For a city that has an image of being one of the nicer areas in the northwest to live in, this seems to have taken quite a lot of Seattle — and the nation, from the ongoing stories — by surprise. It’s a sad commentary on things when something like this happens. A freeway full of people, and not one would pull over to try and talk to this woman, or to see if something could be done. Instead, they did their best to urge her on — because as she had the temerity to try to commit suicide in a public place during a high-traffic time of day (now, is it just me, or doesn’t that scream out “cry for help?”), she was inconveniencing them.

Right.

Anyway, there’s not much I can really add to the general onslaught of reaction to this travesty. I’m surprised and somewhat disheartened that it all played out like this, of course. It’s not at all what I would have expected to see happen. Hopefully the next time something similar happens (though, admittedly, it would be best if that weren’t to come to be), people will think a little less of themselves.

I’m not sure I’m too optimistic about that, though.