Quote:
Originally Posted by cornholio
Its a fair amount. At a rate of about 10 people per 100k per year in BC that would mean roughly 0.8% of all suicides in BC were off the lions gate bridge. (ignoring the fact there are probably more suicides in the north skewing the number up for the whole province). ***Looking at these numbers I found out Nunavut has a serious problem with 71 people per 100k per year killing them selves. Just insane. For males it is 114.
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This is a great point, and I just wanted to expand on this comment.
I think putting up suicide barriers on the Burrard bridge lacks any kind of proportionality.
Is trying to prevent suicides a noble idea? Yes.
Is putting up barriers on the bridge going to prevent suicides? Yes.
Is spending a large amount of money to prevent suicides on the Burrard Bridge going to significantly alter the overall rate of suicides in the province? No.
Could spending the money on other resources for the mentally ill prevent a similar number (or more) suicides? Yes.
To me, it just smacks of white privileged. Here we are, spending all this money to save less than 1 person a year who has poor impulse control.
Meanwhile we shun and label people with mental health problems that seriously contemplate suicide.
We will spend millions build a fence to save a person from a single bad decision; yet we will make people pay for prescriptions for anti-depressants.
We will pay to place suicide phones along the bridge that are manned 24 hours a day to talk people out of suicide; but if you want to talk to a psychiatrist that's $100/hour.
There is 0.7 suicides per year off this bridge; yet the average annual rate for suicides by first nations male youth is 126 per 100,000 (compared to 24 per 100,000 for non-Aboriginal males) and for First Nations females the suicide rate is 35 per 100,000 (compared to only 5 per 100,000 for non-Aboriginal females).
All the tear jerk stories regarding bridge suicides (and they really are, that's not sarcasm) are about how the victim had every thing to live for. Everything was okay in their lives, but one bad decision lead them to the bridge, and if only there was a multi million dollar fence to save their lives...
Yet most people with serious mental problems, who take their lives quietly in their homes, after hundreds of hours of wallowing in anxiety or depression, are completely ignored in our society (or worse, outcast and marginalized by the rest of us). We have huge print stories about the few cases that end in a public way, but nothing about the 500 other people who die each year.
We will spend millions to save that regular person from one mistake, yet make it difficult to be mentally ill.
Now, you might say it's only $3.5 million, and if it saves lives I'm making too big deal about it. But $3.5 million could go a long way in other programs. $3.5 million would buy a lot of psychiatrist hours. It might help get people off the streets. It might help aboriginals feel less disenfranchised. It might help people who don't even realize they have a problem and get them to stop self medicating. It could be spent on public awareness to make us all treat people with mental health problems with more respect and dignity.
But at the end of the day, I can't help but feel like this is done entirely because it has a small yet tangible result (0.7 suicides vs 0 is technically measurable) and politicians can stand in front of it for pictures and congratulate themselves on a job well done, while hundreds of other people still kill themselves in less "glamorous" ways and the rest of us are left in a world that is pretty much exactly the same but with a worse view.
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Seriously, glad they're actually listening now.
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