The Final Leap (16 page)

On this issue, Kevin Hines prefers his father's voice. He has found his calling. It's to make the Golden Gate Bridge safe for others.

“If I could take it all back, I wouldn't,” he told the
Chronicle.
“The places I've gone, the people I've helped, I'd have never met. I had heard that this was the easiest way to die, almost serene. It's not like that—you have a heart attack on the way down, or your limbs fall off and you drown.”

Kevin is married now, and follows a strict schedule today in order to regulate his bipolar disorder. A combination of drugs and therapy enables him to control the manic highs and crushing lows of his illness. He also endures the physical consequences of his jump, the back pain that affects his everyday life and makes taking long car trips or riding in airplanes difficult.

For the first five years, on the anniversary of his leap, Kevin made a point of going to the bridge, walking to the same spot where he vaulted the railing, and dropping a flower into the water. “The first time,” he says, “a sea lion popped up two feet next to the flower. I saw that as a sign—closure.”

His sister carried on the tradition for a few years after that because Kevin was on the road a lot, then he told her to let it go. Today, he's in a far different place than he was when he jumped. His mental illness was diagnosed and is being treated, and he has the maturity of a thirty-year-old man rather than a twenty-year-old youth. The main thing that's changed, though, is his outlook.

“Life is beautiful,” he says, “pain filled, but beautiful. Every day I awaken is a good day.” It's a reminder both of how far he's come and how much is possible if given another chance.

To meet Janet Wilson, one wouldn't guess that many years ago she was poised to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Or that she suffers from a mental illness.
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Wilson is a patients' rights advocate with Mental Health Consumer Concerns, a nonprofit organization that represents mental health patients in administrative hearings in three northern California counties (Contra Costa, Napa, and Solano). She has been with the agency more than twenty-five years, since graduating from law school, and has held a number of positions, including executive director, a position she accepted only on an interim basis. Running an agency isn't nearly as fulfilling, she finds, as being in the trenches, working with and advocating for the rights of the mentally ill. This is because she knows how hard it is for people with a mental illness to ask for, much less receive, proper treatment. Wilson has suffered from bipolar disorder for years.

At age thirteen, she learned the truth about her father's death. Instead of being killed in a car accident when Janet was two years old, as her mother had told her, he shot himself in a car. “It was a defining moment in my life,” Janet says, “and created a template for suicide.”

Both of her siblings subsequently attempted suicide. At sixteen, Janet made the first of “eight or nine serious attempts,” overdosing on pills that caused her to vomit.

In 1975, her sister jumped off an overpass in San Jose. She survived the fall, but ended up severely injured. Janet quit her job at Western Electric, changed her name, and knew—“sibling rivalry”—she says, “That I was going to try and do my sister one better,” i.e. she was going to take her life by jumping from a taller, more dramatic structure.

The Golden Gate Bridge was the obvious choice. “There's something about it,” she says, referring to its magnetic allure.

It was 1979. From her apartment in Oakland she drove her Ford Pinto across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. She wasn't sure that she would jump, in part because she hadn't made provisions for her cat. Still, according to an inner voice the time seemed right. She didn't leave a note because she had no desire to write; there wasn't anyone she wanted to say good-bye to.

After parking on the Marin County side, she put her keys and wallet under the seat in her car and deliberately left it unlocked “in case it [jumping] didn't work.” Then she walked out on the span. Like many days on the bridge, this one was overcast, windy, and cold. She used a hand-held calculus to determine the mid-span so that she was sure to hit water. Like Kevin Hines, she didn't want to jump so close to a pylon that she'd land on concrete or rocks.

Two bridge patrol officers approached her and asked her what she was doing. She replied honestly, saying that she was looking for the best place to jump. She doesn't know why she was so straightforward, only that it didn't occur to her to lie. They drove her to a hospital in San Francisco, then she was transferred to Highland Hospital in Oakland. There she was placed in an unlocked ward, which stunned her. Although she considered herself a high suicide risk, she could have walked out if she wanted to; no one would have stopped her. She didn't have her car, house key, or any money, though. She also didn't have her glasses. A nurse took them when Janet was admitted, leaving Janet virtually blind.

Upon discharge, her mother drove an hour from Cupertino to pick her up, then helped her retrieve her car. After that, Janet self-referred herself to a day-treatment program in Oakland where she learned a problem-solving technique that she still uses.

“If I'm really suicidal and I do the problem-solving technique,” she says, “everything changes dramatically.”

The technique involves taking a sheet of paper and dividing it in half. On one side she lists all of the things she needs to do. On the other side she lists things that she can look forward to. She refers to the latter as STLFTs—Somethings To Look Forward To. The latter need to balance out the former, she says, and can't be as simple as saying on the to-do side that she needs to clean the house and on the other side that she looks forward to having a clean house.

She went to the day-treatment program three times a week for several months, then ended up volunteering there. In 1982, she started an unpaid internship at Mental Health Consumer Concerns, and she has been with the agency ever since.

Going to the bridge was the last time she thought seriously about suicide. At the same time, it's always on her mind. It's always an option even today, more than thirty years later. It's not the first option, however.

In honor of her father, she went to law school because he had been a lawyer. She had no interest in practicing law or even taking the bar, though. She wanted to follow his footsteps as far as law school, but no farther. After she graduated, she put it behind her.

June 12 is the anniversary of her father's death. She usually calls into work sick that day. In 2010, on June 12, she and a friend drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and walked across the span. It was the first time she had walked on it since 1979. The experience brought lots of memories, but that was all. She had no desire to jump, no immediate desire to die.

At the end of our interview, she hands me a ceramic tile, made to be hung, with the Golden Gate Bridge painted on it. “For you,” she says. “Good luck with your book. I hope a lot of people read it, and that it helps end suicides from the bridge.”

A small number of barrier opponents believe that lives are saved precisely because the bridge doesn't have a barrier. They maintain that when people are stopped from jumping off the bridge, they're directed to others who provide counseling and support. Suicide attempters may have never reached out to anyone before, and after they're stopped they're able to talk with someone about their problems. This enables them to get the help they desperately need. In a few cases, like Wilson's, the argument has validity. More often than not, though, it's specious. Many jumpers have received counseling and been prescribed antidepressants prior to their deaths. Some are so bent on suicide and fixate on the bridge so strongly that once they're stopped, treated, and released, they return and try to jump again. Equally important, while bridge police and California Highway Patrol officers intervene successfully in 65 to 70 percent of attempted suicides, they fail to save everyone else. How is it possible to justify leaving things the way they are when it means that people continue to die every month? Then there are the instances I've mentioned previously where a young child was thrown off the bridge. The correlation between their deaths and the low railing is undeniable. It's worth noting, too, that bridge personnel aren't resource specialists. They are not equipped to assess a person's needs—particularly a person who is mentally ill— and refer them to appropriate services. Their sole goal is to get someone who is suicidal off the bridge safely and as quickly as possible, then see that he or she is transported to a hospital. Lastly, not everyone stopped by bridge police or the California Highway Patrol is hospitalized. Some attempters are released on the spot if police feel that they don't present an immediate risk.

Richard Heckler is a therapist and the author of a book about suicide attempt survivors titled
Waking Up, Alive.
He talked with a reporter about the effect of surviving an attempt. “It is possible not only to recover from being suicidal, but it is possible to lead a rich, fulfilled life afterward,” Heckler said. “When people come out of this experience, they don't say, ‘I want to bulk up my 401(k)' or ‘I want to build a second house in Mexico.' They've been touched very deeply.”

That's the case with Janet Wilson, and it's also the case with Kevin Hines and Ken Baldwin. What they experienced changed them. Each chose to give back—Wilson through her patients' rights work, Hines through his advocacy for mental health programs and a bridge barrier, Baldwin through his teaching.

In 2007, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline convened a group of eight suicide attempt survivors, including Kevin Hines. Participants described their experiences and noted key “turning points” in which their desire to live outweighed their desire to die. Feelings of self-worth and the ability to connect with others were common themes that assisted each person's recovery.

“I recognized my value to other people,” one person said.

“I found I could do something for someone else. I could do something useful with my life,” said another.

“When you are isolated from others,” said a third person, “you can't see support around you. Once I really saw someone, it made a difference.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, to people who aren't familiar with mental illness, the group agreed that a person's pain may not go away. Sometimes it does, but other times it returns. Even when it returns, though, it may return less frequently. Antidepressants help. So does talking. “Talking doesn't change the event,” one participant said, “but can change how I feel about it and can make me feel less alone.”

The Lifeline convened the group in an effort to better understand the thought processes of a suicidal person and to identify effective ways for phone counselors to support them. Even though their thinking was impaired at the time they tried to kill themselves, suicide attempt survivors are the only people who can speak about the subject from first-hand experience.

Similarly, when it comes to suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge, the only group of true experts are the handful of individuals who have jumped from the bridge and lived. They're the only ones who know the real mindset of people who jump, what leads them to the edge, why the bridge was their chosen means, and what would have happened if they were prevented from jumping. All eight survivors whom David Rosen interviewed in 1975 said they were in favor of a barrier. “If there had been a barrier,” one said, “I would have gone home and forgotten about it.” “The only solution is a barrier,” another said. “That's it.”

Most recent survivors—especially Kevin Hines—agree. Even Ken Baldwin, the high school teacher in Angel's Camp who told me he was in so much pain that even if the bridge had a barrier he would have found another way to die, acknowledges that a barrier will stop individuals from jumping off. You can't stop people from killing themselves, he believes, but you can stop them from using the Golden Gate Bridge to do it.

That's a good start. No one is naïve enough to think that once the Golden Gate Bridge has a suicide deterrent, the problem of suicide will be solved. Any kind of deterrent will save lives, though—and it doesn't end there. That's because one life represents more than one life. When you save someone, you save everyone who loves him or her from a lifetime of heartache. The pain of a loved one's suicide is deep and felt by all who knew the person. You also save generations of that person's family to follow. Future individuals have the opportunity to be born, grow up, marry, and have children because the lineage is continued. In addition, you save all of the professional skills that these future generations will acquire. As if that wasn't enough, you remove the dark cloud that hangs over one of the most beautiful man-made structures in the world. All this, and the only thing that's needed is a slightly taller railing or a net—something that, once it's up, will be taken for granted.

The few survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps know full well the value of making the bridge safe. They're living it. The only reason they're alive today is because of a confluence of factors bordering on the miraculous. First, they hit the water just right, neither too upright nor slightly askew, and were able to get back to the surface despite major injuries. Second, there were witnesses to the jump who reported it immediately. Third, there were either boaters nearby who rescued the person or Coast Guard crews who got there quickly. And finally, the person received prompt medical care for physical injuries and effective psychological treatment to deal with inner demons. Anything less at any point and the outcome would have been different. The person would have died— like so many others.

1
. Nationally, more than ten million people have been diagnosed with a severe and persistent mental illness. This includes schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Schizophrenia is characterized by bizarre, grandiose, persecutory, or jealous delusions, auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), illogical thinking, blunted or inappropriate moods, and catatonia. Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder; a person experiences mood swings that are elevated, expansive, or irritable. Depression is a common emotional problem and a natural reaction to stress. Depression becomes more serious, however, when a person becomes immobilized and unable to function. It can be caused by chemical changes in the body, a situational life crisis and the way a person responds to it, or past events thought forgotten. If you're severely depressed, you don't feel like your usual self. You may assume that friends and family no longer “know” you and make it difficult for people to communicate with you.
    There are dozens of additional mental illnesses. Among the more common are attention deficit disorder, conduct and anxiety disorders, attachment disorders, oppositional disorders, and eating disorders. Successful treatment usually requires medication and/or psychotherapy. Even many types of psychosis, where a person's distorted thinking and perceptions lead to a mistaken belief about what's real, respond rapidly to proper medication and professional counseling.