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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.

Reducing access to means and methods is the best way prevent suicide, and that includes physical security around frequently used locations, especially if they involve trains or high places.

There's often a strong resistance to this and I don't understand why.

See this rather old English government advice: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

(See in particular case study 2 and case study 3 on pages 22 and 25)

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  There's often a strong resistance to
  this and I don't understand why.

The suicide prevention features added to my local railway station look like were designed by a prison architect who believed nice views were a major cause of suicide.

It’s dystopian to prevent only suicide and not the causes. It invokes a feeling of being somewhat like a farm animal: you exist to consume and work for the benefit of others, and if you’re unhappy that’s your problem. You certainly can’t decide to escape in any way, by design.

I remember watching a documentary on assisted suicide where they said that many people who are approved never follow through, but knowing they have a way out provides a great deal of relief.

With that in mind, I can easily see how things like fences might make the problem worse as you said. People will feel even more trapped and helpless when what they need is the opposite.

On the other hand, recognizing that one is a farm animal is the first step to getting off the farm.

Yes it is. Reminds me of the case where NYU installed fences in the Bobst library to prevent more suicides [0]. Basically it comes down to not being concerned about the causes but find a solution to prevent the suicides on the premises of the campus. I see it as, go kill yourself someplace else, we don't want the negative image.

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyu-bobst-library-suicides-al...

A significant percentage of people who come across an obstacle to their planned method of suicide will never try again. They are not intended to go elsewhere.

How would a statistic like this be calculated? We can talk to people who were going to commit suicide, encountered an obstacle, and decided not to. How can we determine how many people decided to commit suicide, encountered an obstacle, and used some other method?

I think that what they're getting at is that once the impulse is not met with success it ceases its grip and might lessen to some extent. Not sure I agree with it but at the same time it is possible that if the means of committing suicide were more easily available and required less upfront effort a lot wouldn't have the time to hesitate and commit to it

Look them up later on and see if they're dead. https://medium.com/@ennyman/a-lesson-from-29-golden-gate-sui...

We can look at natural experiments like England's switch away from coal gas, or the introduction of catalytic convertors, and the decline in rates of suicide in the years afterwards. Both these events removed popular methods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0

Start at 6:50 for reducing access to means and methods.

But this isn't preventing only suicide -- it's one part of a package to reduce suicide.

It's a very important part, and you must have reducing access to means and methods if you want to reduce the numbers of people killing themselves.

I disagree. Preventing suicide, even impulsive suicide, is impossible. I could enumerate all the ways I can see just looking around me but I don't want to ruin my day and yours. However, seeing that people are scared of this doesn't exactly make me think that society cares about me, it implies they're scared of how unhappy people are and have no idea what to do about it.

You are wrong. It is quite well established that blocking a specific method of suicide can prevent people from trying. What you say is true in a technical sense but is completely ignorant of the actual ways that humans behave.

Yes, it can block people from trying that specific method. I have no idea how you would measure the impact on preventing people from trying at all. Do you have a source? I'm curious about how they measured it.

This was a quick google away:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/health/blocking-the-paths...

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=923193...

>Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.

Point taken.

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