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There was a section about this phenomenon in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is more or less about how our brains able to process enormous amounts of information in an instant where days or weeks of conscious analysis might fail us. Anyway, I remember a chapter where he gives the example of suicide barricades. I don't remember any of the statistics exactly, but it was something about how some places give people all the cues that trigger the impulse to commit suicide while other places that are almost identical do not - that it's something about the combination of all the ideas associated with the place and the physical characteristics of the place itself. He then talks about some studies that were done where they split people who have attempted suicide into two categories - the ones who used methods that are pretty much failsafe (jumping from great heights, shooting yourself in the head...) vs. the ones who use methods that are likely to fail if someone intervenes in time (pills, slitting your wrists...). Again, I can't remember the exact results he reports, but the gist of the conclusion was that the people who are really suicidal over the long term and not just feeling a suicidal impulse because of temporary circumstances (like sudden foreclosure, job loss, divorce, etc.) are more likely to use the unsuccessful methods of suicide. The ones who just got a pink slip and a dear john letter in the same day and feel, in that moment, that there is nothing to live for are more likely to pick the irreversible methods - they are the ones who will shoot themselves in the head or jump off of bridges.
But then the interesting part is what this study says about the assumption that people who are suicidal and prevented from jumping off a bridge are just going to find another way to kill themselves. Based on the kind of people who end up jumping from bridges, the opposite is true. Those are usually the people who are happy to live and grateful for being rescued. Another part of the study (or maybe it was a separate one) surveyed people who had reported suicidal thoughts, and apparently a simple thing such as a physical barrier can prevent the whole thing. Since most of the people who jump off of bridges do so as a sort of impulse, these same people reported that they had once gone out intending to die and came home and decided to live after running into some kind of complication with their plan. One guy, for instance, wasn't able to get to the side of the bridge he wanted to jump from because of some traffic thing. He decided to just go home because he didn't want to die by getting hit by a car while trying to run across six lanes of traffic to get to the side of the bridge he wanted. In other words, he didn't really want to just die. He wanted to die in a grandiose scene that he imagined which involved a certain setting - he wanted to die the way he'd planned. That extra time and energy it took for him to consider running across six lanes of traffic got him thinking about whether or not he was really ready to die at all and it prevented his suicide.
Anyway, I don't know much that study came into play when they decided to erect the barrier, but I do know that a lot of suicide prevention advocacy groups push for this kind of thing at popular places to commit suicide because they are all very aware of this study and others like it. And, perhaps more importantly, it will actually work.
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"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
(Michael Jordan)
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