If you’ve ever felt the sudden urge to leap off of a tall building, you’re already familiar with the concept of l’appel du vide — a French term that literally translates as “the call of the void” and refers to a sudden but passing urge to engage in self-destructive behavior. I’ve always heard this voice, although its specific suggestions change from time to time. Rather than jumping from a great height, for example, it might tell me to crawl down onto the BART tracks on my commute home or chug the drain cleaner sitting under my sink.
I’m far from alone in this, however. Researchers from Florida State University estimate that up to 30% of people experience similar intrusive thoughts. Ironically, these are rarely linked to true suicidal behavior. Quite the opposite, in fact — the study found that rather than indicating a death wish, l’appel du vide is simply a misinterpreted message from your brain warning you to not act recklessly.
When I began to picture myself jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge last winter, I largely brushed it off as just another example of those disturbing but easily dismissed thoughts. True, I was feeling a little off, but I had grown so accustomed to these images throughout my life that I was hardly fazed by them. But as I sunk further and further into depression, I realized that this was something more. Jumping off the bridge was no longer just an intrusive thought. It was a fantasy — one that increased in strength each time I crossed the bridge in the morning on my way to work and in the evening on my commute home.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
Although I now recognize that this was a textbook example of distorted thinking, statements like “I am not good enough,” “I wasn’t meant to be happy,” and “there’s nothing left for me to look forward to” interrupted my stream of consciousness so frequently that they became as true to me as “the sky is blue.” After a few weeks of being constantly assaulted by these thoughts, I was despondent. I could hardly eat, I spent all day at work trying to hold back tears, and the only time I would drag myself out of my apartment was when I could no longer stand my dog’s whining to go outside.
Exhausted, I came to the conclusion that I only had one option to make it all go away. On a Thursday in late May, I wrote a note for my family and friends and began to call an Uber to take me to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the top suicide sites in the world, surpassed only by the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China. People have jumped off of the bridge for nearly as long as it’s been accessible to the public; the first recorded suicide — a World War I veteran suspected to have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder — took place less than three months after the bridge’s opening on May 27, 1937. In the years since, hundreds have followed suit, spanning from a five-year-old girl urged to jump by her father to John F. Kennedy’s 28-year-old former caddy to an 85-year-old grandfather. Currently, the total number of deaths by suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge is estimated to be around 1,700, although this figure is likely higher since not all victims are witnessed jumping, and not all bodies are recovered.
Golden Gate Bridge suicides have long intrigued the media and the public, sometimes to a disturbing degree.
“San Francisco had been accused of taking a perverse pride in its reputation,” says Ann Garrison in “Our Beautiful, Lethal Bridge,” a 1998 essay. “Tour bus drivers cited the death toll as they passed the bridge, the city’s daily papers announced each leap.”
This morbid fascination came to a head in 1995, when the Marin County coroner requested that media outlets stop keeping an official count after several people vied to become the 1,000th person to die by suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the New Yorker, “a local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim.” In keeping with recommended suicide prevention guidelines for the media, publications no longer strictly track the number of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge and rarely report on individual cases unless they involve notable figures or affect the general public.
Of course, these measures didn’t cause the fervor to die down entirely. In the years since 1995, the topic of Golden Gate Bridge suicides has been prominently featured in books, documentaries, and more articles than can be counted. Each one begs the question: Why this bridge?
You can’t help but feel a sense of wonder when you visit the Golden Gate Bridge. Even on a cloudy day, the view from the bridge is striking (provided that Karl/Karla the Fog isn’t making an appearance as well). Look out toward the city while standing on it, and you’ll see a magnificent panorama, spanning from the dense vegetation of the Presidio to the austere buildings of the financial district to the lone isle of Alcatraz to the hills of Marin, looming in the outskirts of your peripheral vision. All the while, some 220 feet below you, the turbulent water churns into frothy whitecaps.
It’s a poetic image, to be sure. In the public sphere, this romantic aesthetic is frequently cited as a reason why actively suicidal people are so drawn to the bridge. A 2005 article from SFGate entitled “Lethal Beauty” describes the last view of a Golden Gate Bridge jumper as “a panorama enthralling in its harmony of land, sea, and sky.”
“Even when the cooling fog blunts the view, the vast majority of jumpers take their last step facing east instead of west toward the Pacific,” the article notes. Other publications have referred to the Golden Gate Bridge as “a symbol of pain” and “the nation’s favorite spot for suicide.”
Although jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge has been glamorized to a degree, there’s a much bigger reason it’s become such a suicide hot spot: It’s there, and it’s accessible.
‘Romanticizing the suicides has a tendency to get one to thinking there is nothing that can be done about the jumping problem. That kind of view supports taking no action to resolve the issue, which is exactly what happened for over 75 years at the Gate.’
“Most of the discussion about [the bridge being] ‘romanticized’ has been speculative in nature. As such, it takes away from the central problem — easy access to lethal means,” says Paul Muller, president and founding member of the Bridge Rail Foundation, an organization created with the goal of ending suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Under scrutiny, many of the romanticized beliefs surrounding suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge don’t hold water. Take, for instance, the aforementioned reference to jumpers leaping from the east side of the bridge.
“There was speculation about why so many jumpers did so from the east side of the bridge, as though they were jumping back into the bay, away from the abyss of the ocean, back to the country and homeland, embracing where they came from, back to the womb, etc. However, in reality, the east walkway is the most open and accessible,” Muller adds.
Muller’s statement surprised me at first. Truth be told, I did find something macabrely beautiful about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in my depressed state. But as I think about it further, I realize I likely wouldn’t have even considered jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge had I not passed over it twice a day.
Another misconception about the Golden Gate is that it serves as an international suicide destination. On the contrary, “85% of bridge jumpers live within an hour’s drive of the bridge, and 92% live in California. Less than 8% are from out of state or abroad,” the Bridge Rail Foundation’s website states.
The mythos that the bridge has developed over the years isn’t just false — it’s dangerous, Muller says.
“Romanticizing the suicides has a tendency to get one to thinking there is nothing that can be done about the jumping problem,” he explains. “That kind of view supports taking no action to resolve the issue, which is exactly what happened for over 75 years at the Gate.”
Creating a physical barrier to prevent suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge was initially discussed in the 1950s, but the idea didn’t gain traction until much later. Earlier efforts to create a barrier faced an uphill battle as opponents declared that proposed designs, such as barbed wire fences, were an eyesore that would detract from the bridge’s grandeur. Besides, critics argued, a barrier would only encourage suicidal people to choose a different method — something that Muller says is untrue.
According to one study that Muller cited, building a barrier at the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., not only stopped suicides from taking place there, but they also did not increase at an unprotected bridge just blocks away. Mounting evidence of barrier effectiveness such as this, in addition to persistent pressure from advocacy organizations, eventually won out. After a yearslong bureaucratic tango, the Golden Gate Bridge board of directors approved funding in 2014 for a net that would prevent jumpers from falling all the way down.
Construction on the net began in 2019 and was originally projected to be completed in January 2021, although the timeline has since been pushed back two years to January 2023 — a delay that is expected to cost an additional $23 million. At least one part of the renovations, however — replacing the bridge’s maintenance traveler systems — isn’t slated for completion until April 2024.
‘A handful of people — fewer than 35 — have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Nearly every one said afterward that they wanted to live as soon as they went over the side.’
The Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District pointed to a difficult transition period when the contractor, Shimmick Construction, was acquired by AECOM in 2017 as well as challenges in accessing certain work sites on the bridge and a slower-than-expected pace. The contractor, on the other hand, insists that the delays are a result of being asked to apply standards at odds with state law as well as to work outside the scope of the original project. While it’s not clear who exactly is responsible, what is certain is that the net will be completed well beyond its intended debut.
Upon hearing the news that the long-awaited barrier would be postponed, Muller felt “horror and disappointment.”
“Two years means an additional 60 or so deaths,” he added.
The history of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge is a long and sordid one, but there is nevertheless reason to be hopeful. On a large scale, the soon-to-be-erected suicide net deterrent system is expected to save countless lives. Barriers at formerly very active suicide sites like the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building have been found to drastically reduce the number of deaths.
“Where nets have been erected as suicide barriers, they’ve proven to be 100% effective thus far,” Denis Mulligan, CEO and general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, told CNN in 2014.
And on an individual level, there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of suicidal episodes are only temporary.
“The idea that [suicidal ideation] can pass is not well understood in the public,” Muller explains. “90% of people who make an attempt [to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge] and do not die as a result do not subsequently die by suicide.”
“A handful of people — fewer than 35 — have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge,” the Bridge Rail Foundation website says. “Nearly every one said afterward that they wanted to live as soon as they went over the side.”
When I was actively suicidal, I couldn’t stand hearing things like “it gets better” or “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” While I knew that people who offered these sentiments meant well, it always came across as condescending and cliché. If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, I won’t echo those same vague platitudes to you, but I will ask you to consider that the negative thoughts that have lodged themselves in your brain are not objective. You might think that there’s no point in continuing on, but you have to remember — just because you think something doesn’t mean it’s true. And first and foremost, I encourage you to get help from a professional.
It’s impossible to go about your daily life in San Francisco without seeing the Golden Gate Bridge. Even if you don’t live near it, you’re bound to run across it on tourists’ T-shirts, street art, and hell, even the Cisco logo. At one time, this served as a painful reminder of the worst moment of my life. But a year and a half later, I’m finally able to look at that system of red towers and suspension cables and think, “Fuck yeah, I made it through — and I know you can too.”
Suicide is preventable. Anyone who is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis should immediately reach out for help by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1(800)273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. You can also reach out to the local San Francisco Crisis Line by calling (415)781–0500 or texting MYLIFE to 741741 for 24/7 confidential support.
