Suicide Hotspots: Fatal Attraction

BACK IN AUGUST, as a taxi that had entered Atal Setu via Airoli, was zipping through the bridge, its passenger, Reema Mukesh Patel, asked the driver to pull up. Patel, a woman in her mid-50s, got into the cab close to her house in Mulund, and told the driver to drive her to the bridge. Now, she told him she wanted to offer some pictures of gods and goddesses to the sea.

It was around 7PM, and the setting sun probably cast a gorgeous shadow over the bridge. Patel walked up to the railing. But instead of merely dropping the pictures from that point, she began climbing over it, and then, as she dropped some pictures, she settled herself on the other side, her hands holding on to the railing. If it was suicide she had on her mind, it was as though she had stopped for one final moment to collect her thoughts.

Within minutes, a swarm of policemen arrived in a speeding vehicle. And although Patel tried to leap into the sea, the alert cab driver gripped her by her hair, as the policemen then pulled her back to safety. Patel would later tell the policemen that she ‘almost’ fell because she panicked upon seeing them, although it is widely believed she was trying to kill herself.

Hers was the first, and only case, of an unsuccessful suicide attempt on the bridge. Three individuals had killed themselves by plunging to their deaths before her. Two more would follow—in the space of just three days—in September.

Atal Setu, which was thrown open to the public in January this year, is an engineering marvel. Connecting the southern end of Mumbai to the satellite city of Navi Mumbai, and stretching across a total of 21.8 km, with 16 km directly over the sea, it is the country’s longest sea bridge and is said to be the world’s twelfth longest. With five suicides and one failed attempt, it is now also gaining the reputation of a suicide hotspot.

A state government official appears despondent when asked about these suicides. “The Atal Setu is not just an engineering marvel, but also such a beautiful place. We built it in such a way that commuters could also enjoy the view,” says the official, requesting anonym­ity. “Even in our wildest dreams, we never imagined that it would become a suicide spot.”

Most suicides tend to occur in private, usually behind closed doors at home. In India, the two most common methods of taking one’s life, for instance, are by hanging and consuming poison (the two made up for 83.6 per cent of all suicides that occurred in 2022, according to the National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2022 report), both of which tend to take place in private. However, certain public spaces world over, although smaller in number compared to private acts of suicide, acquire notoriety as suicide hotspots.

In large urban cities, these spots tend to be places like bridges and tall buildings, car parks, and railway tracks, while in smaller towns, places like cliffs and woodland areas tend to be preferred. These sites offer some seclusion and fewer chances of interrup­tion. And as media reports and stories about these spaces as sui­cide points spread, others who are suicidal get drawn to these sites.

Something very similar to what appears to be happening at Atal Setu occurred in Mumbai when the other engineering marvel in the city, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, was first opened to the public in 2009. Many individuals would drive to a certain point on the bridge, often late at night, and leap to their deaths. This eventually led to a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Bombay High Court in 2014 asking for the deployment of more closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and security personnel. The PIL was only disposed of four years later, once the Maharashtra State Road Development Corpo­ration (MSRDC) had upgraded security measures, including the installation of 65 CCTV cameras on the bridge, and 15 below, and the appointment of 30 guards in three shifts to spot and prevent such attempts. Suicides at the Sea Link still occur, although their frequency appears to have reduced in recent times.

DRAWING A PARALLEL with the suicides that occurred on the Sea Link earlier on, Hemangi Mhaprolkar, execu­tive general manager and clinical psychologist with Mpower, an initiative that works in the mental health space, including running a helpline, points towards how new struc­tures that garner a lot of attention become spots that attract those who are considering taking their lives. “The suicides there are also purely because it’s a new structure, it comes frequently on the news…. It becomes a hotspot in the eyes of the people because it was one of the new things they could think of,” she says.

The government official quoted above however points out how stopping suicides at Atal Setu is far more challenging than the Sea Link. “The Sea Link is about 5.6km long. If a car stops at some point on the bridge, the security personnel can reach that spot from the security point before the individual can take the extreme step. By comparison, Atal Setu is nearly 22km long. Even if you spot any suspicious movement, it can get very difficult to reach that spot on time,” the official says.

But why would an individual go to a place like Atal Setu, a journey that takes an hour or more to get to from most areas in Mumbai, and one which will require driving a car or hailing a cab, and also a toll of `250, when faster and more convenient options are available?

Mhaprolkar points out that Atal Setu might be selected exactly because it is far and inconvenient. Suicides tend to be viewed as impulsive acts. But when an individual chooses to carry them out in a public place, many of the individuals might be doing so, some experts like Mhaprolkar believe, to give themselves time to consider their actions, or perhaps even increase the opportuni­ties for someone to intervene or dissuade them from taking their lives. “If I start from my home and I travel right up to Atal Setu, it’s a two-hour journey. In that period, somebody might try to call me or talk me out of it. Or I may be thinking about something else, say my loved ones or my family, and have a change of heart,” Mhaprolkar says. “When you go to a place like Atal Setu to die, it’s also a way of buying more time.”

What has not helped is also the images and videos of suicide attempts on the bridge going viral online, attracting those who are suicidal to the spot.

As the number of suicides has increased, there has been a grow­ing demand for the installation of safety nets or the construction of barriers to prevent them. The official mentioned above however points out the numerous challenges in doing so. “Atal Setu spans across sensitive environmental areas like mangroves and mud­flats. Flamingos are known to fly through this stretch and might get harmed if there were nets. Also, you will need a lot of environ­mental clearances for installing such things. So it is not easy at all,” the official says, while mentioning that an expert committee from IIT Bombay is being consulted to offer suggestions on this issue.

Globally, most attempts at reducing suicides at hotspots have revolved around restricting access to the spaces, like building bar­riers on bridges, for instance; encouraging seeking of help by put­ting up numbers of helplines or positive messages at these spots; increasing the likelihood of intervention by a third party by deploy­ing more CCTVs or security personnel; and encouraging more re­sponsible media reporting on suicides that take place at such spots.

A 2015 paper in The Lancet Psychiatry, which reviewed studies conducted at various hotspots across the world, found that such interventions bring down suicides drastically. It found that the number of people taking their own lives dropped from 5.8 each year on average (863 suicides over 150 years) before interventions were introduced to 2.4 thereafter (211 suicides over 88 years).

But wouldn’t preventing suicides at one spot lead to a rise in another? Surely an individual, whose attempt at taking his or her life is thwarted at one spot, could seek out an alternative spot? This however does not seem to be the case.

A 2014 paper in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health that examined the data on suicides at Gateway Bridge (now named the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges) and Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia – two of the biggest hotspots in the city until recently – and other spots, found that no such substitution occurs when interventions lead to the reduction of suicides in one spot.

After the installation of barriers on the Gateway Bridge in 1993, the number of suicides from this site dropped 53 per cent for the next four years. This figure dropped even more in subse­quent years, and the installation of higher barriers in 2010 led to a complete stop in suicides from this spot till the time this paper was published. None of this reduction however led to a rise in the neighbouring suicide hotspot of Story Bridge or other locations.

Suicides are believed by many to be impulsive acts that are carried out in a moment of crisis. When you see such a suicidal individual through that moment of crisis, whether at a hotspot or elsewhere, there is a good chance such an individual will not try to commit such an act later in life. The most famous suicide hotspot in the world is probably the Golden Gate Bridge which connects San Francisco with Marin County in the US. Around 2,000 people are known to have jumped to their deaths from the bridge since it was completed in 1937, although this tally is expected to be much higher since not all jumps are witnessed. And after decades of effort, three-and-a-half miles of stainless steel netting were installed under the bridge to prevent suicides earlier this year. The suicides that occurred here became the subject of a 2003 New Yorker article, where survivors told the writer they regretted their act immediately after leaping from the bridge. One of them, Ken Baldwin, tells the writer, “I instantly realised that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.” The article men­tions a 1978 study titled Where Are They Now?—published by Richard Seiden, a leading researcher on suicide at the bridge – which followed up on 515 people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. Seiden found that 94 per cent of them were still alive or had died of natural causes 26 years later. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behaviour is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded. See through that crisis, and there is a good chance he or she would not repeat that act.

Biju Dominic is well aware of the importance of dealing with such moments. As the chairman at Final Mile Consulting, and now also chief evangelist at Fractal Analytics, with which the firm merged some years ago, Dominic’s firm used behavioural science to deal with a lot of real-world challenges. One of these was the large number of deaths that occurs while crossing Mumbai’s railway tracks. Using simple interventions that target the trespassers’ sub­conscious mind, like using carefully calibrated honks by the train, photopanelsofthefaceofamanbeingrunoverputupacrosstheplat­forms, and certain parts of railway tracks being coloured to provide a better perspective of the oncoming train’s speed., Dominic and his colleagues were able to bring down the number of deaths by trespassing at a particularly notorious stretch near Wadala station from 40 deaths in 2010 to 10 the next year. He expanded these inter­ventions to three other stations on Mumbai’s local train network some years later before the pandemic brought the exercise to a halt.

During those years as he studied the number of deaths on Mum­bai’s tracks, he also realised many of these involved suicides. One such spot was a location between Mankhurd and Vashi stations, an area that contains salt pans and marshy areas. “There used to be many deaths reported there. But there weren’t really people living close by. So, I personally went to check it out and spoke to those who worked on the salt pans. So, I came back with two explana­tions. Either the deaths were happening because of thieves, who used hooks and other implements to strike at passengers in trains [standing by its doors] to steal their mobile phones. Or those were suicides,” he says. This eventually led to more patrolling by railway police force personnel at that location and a reduction in deaths.

In 2017, the authorities in another city, Kolkata, reached out to Dominic to curb suicides in one of the city’s biggest hotspots—its Metro network. Kolkata’s Metro witnesses a large number of sui­cides every year—Kolkata Metro Railway revealed that there had been 361 attempts till September last year, out of which 187 were foiled—and, the authorities have over the years tried out many solu­tions, from displaying messages from survivors to, more recently, putting up guard rails on some platforms. “It was a big issue for them. Not only did it cause a huge number of deaths, it was also massive disruption, with Metro services being stalled till the body could be removed,” Dominic says.

Studying the patterns of suicide attempts at the tracks, Dominic found that most of them occurred at the point of entry for the train on the platform, a location which tends to be a bit darker than the rest, and where the trains are at their fastest. Looking up steps that had been undertaken by railway authorities in Japan, he came up with the idea of illuminating these sections with blue light. Such blue lights have been installed in some platforms in Japan too, and are believed to create a calming atmosphere. He also came up with the idea of installing posters with positive messages and suicide helplines. However, the officer who was keen on these solutions got transferred before they could be introduced, and the project fell through.

Dominic remains a votary of studying the patterns of those who try to take their lives. He believes these can throw up telltale signs that can be useful. In the future, artificial intelligence could become a crucial technology, he says, in identifying such patterns and help­ing bring suicide numbers down.

Dominic remains a votary of studying the patterns of those who try to take their lives. He believes these can throw up telltale signs that can be useful. In the future, artificial intelligence could become a crucial technology, he says, in identifying such patterns and help•ing bring suicide numbers down.
To Dominic, being suicidal is a pathological condition that re•quires intervention in the form of professional help. What can make a difference, especially in hotspots, he says, is changing the context. “I think there is a context that allows or ‘encourages’ a person to take his life,” he says. “We should ask, can we change that context to make sure that the individual says, ‘OK, let me not do it today’.”

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