Who’s at Fault if Suicide Deterrents Fail?

July 9th, 2010. By AbiK

A study done by Canadian researchers looks at suicide barriers—those grids or bars on bridges and places like the observation deck of the Empire State Building that are supposed to prevent would-be suicide victims. According to an article at healthfinder.gov, the study showed that, “suicide barriers on bridges may fail to reduce overall rates of people jumping to their deaths because jumpers may go elsewhere to commit suicide.”

I read that line and thought, “No kidding.”

Read it again to ensure you understand what the study was trying to ascertain. The idea was to see if having suicide barriers in a geographical area translated into a lower suicide rate for that area as a whole—ie, not just whether the rate of suicides went down at the specific location where the barriers had been installed.

The article goes on to quote Dr. Mark Sinyor, resident physician at the University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s psychiatry department as saying, “This research shows that constructing a barrier on a bridge with a high rate of suicide by jumping is likely to reduce or eliminate suicides at that bridge but it may not alter absolute suicide rates by jumping when there are comparable bridges nearby.”

Yes, you read that correctly. And I don’t mean to belittle the study (ok, maybe I do) but let’s try to make some analogies here. Will putting a lock on a car with a GPS system inside prevent the theft of a GPS system in an unlocked car nearby? Will living in a “dry town” keep people from drinking and bringing booze into town? (No—I live in one and can answer that one first-hand.)

Ok, let’s look at it from another angle—one which might make more sense. If everyone in a town wears SPF 30 sunscreen daily, would you expect the rate of sunburns to go down? Why, yes! Ahh, but look at what’s different here. You’ve altered individual behavior—not the attributes of some inanimate object. Chances are, if someone is determined to commit suicide, my guess is they’ll find a way. So there’s a suicide barrier on this bridge? No matter—there’s plenty of other bridges.

But this whole study raised another question for me. If suicide barriers are in place to deter—actually prevent—suicides, what happens when they don’t prevent them? Honestly—if you’ve been to the top of the Empire State Building, you know that if you were hell-bent on jumping, you just might be able to do so. Sure, it would take some doing and a guard—or sightseer—would most likely grab you first. But it’s not an impossibility. Case in point: Cameron Dabaghi who just recently managed it.

So is there liability there? Is there a wrongful death case? Defective product? After all, the suicide barriers are put in place to stop a suicide from happening. Does it really matter that Dabaghi apparently wantedto die?

Most people would probaby argue that, no, if someone takes it upon themselves to overcome a barrier that in 99% of the cases should prevent someone from killing themselves, then the barrier or whoever installed it should not be held liable. Reasonable precautions had been taken. It’s not quite like the reverse situation where a tragic accident occurs—I’m recalling Eric Clapton’s son’s death—and questions arise regarding a landlord’s liability to install window guards. Suicide is no accident.

Still, when I think of lawsuits for things like Toyota sticking accelerators—even if less than one percent of folks driving an affected car winds up in an accident, there’s been a product performance failure with potentially dire consequences. So what is a “reasonable” level of performance? or a “reasonable” level of precaution?

Tags: suicide, Suicide Barriers

This was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Defective Products, Emerging Issues, Personal Injury . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.