“[Town] gas had unique advantages as a lethal method,” criminologist Ronald Clarke wrote in his classic 1988 essay laying out the first sustained argument in favor of coupling:
It was widely available (in about 80 percent of British homes) and required little preparation or specialist knowledge, making it an easy choice for less mobile people and for those coming under sudden extreme stress. It was painless, did not result in disfigurement, and did not produce a mess (which women in particular will try to avoid).…Deaths by hanging, asphyxiation, or drowning all usually demand more planning, while more courage would be needed with the more violent methods of shooting, cutting, stabbing, crashing one’s car, and jumping off high places or in front of trains or buses.
There is something awfully matter-of-fact about that paragraph, isn’t there? Nowhere in Clarke’s article does he speak empathetically about the suicidal, or dwell on the root causes of their pain. He analyzes the act the way an engineer would look at a mechanical problem. “The whole idea wasn’t very popular at all amongst psychiatrists and social workers,” Clarke remembers:
They thought it was very superficial, that these people were so upset and demoralized that it was sort of insulting to think you could deal with it by simply making it harder to commit suicide. I got quite a lot of pushback here and there from people about that idea.3
This simply isn’t the way we talk about suicide. We act as if the method were irrelevant. When gas was first introduced into British homes in the 1920s, two government commissions were created to consider the new technology’s implications. Neither mentioned the possibility that it might lead to increased suicides. When the official British government report on the gas-modernization program came out in 1970, it stated that one of the positive side effects of the transition to natural gas would be a decline in fatal accidents. It didn’t even mention suicide—even though the number of people who killed themselves deliberately with gas dwarfed the number who died from it accidentally. In 1981, the most comprehensive academic work on the subject, A History of the British Gas Industry, was published. It goes into extraordinary detail about every single aspect of the advent and growth of gas heating and gas stoves in English life. Does it mention suicide, even in passing? No.
Or consider the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Since it opened in 1937, it has been the site of more than 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period.4
What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping, or a net was installed to catch them before they fell. The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn’t go on to jump off something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.
Sure enough, this is exactly what seems to be the case, according to a very clever bit of detective work by psychologist Richard Seiden. Seiden followed up on 515 people who had tried to jump from the bridge between 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained. Just 25 of those 515 persisted in killing themselves some other way. Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that given moment.
So when did the municipal authority that runs the bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, more than eighty years after the bridge opened. As John Bateson points out in his book The Final Leap, in the intervening period, the bridge authority spent millions of dollars building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate Bridge. It spent millions building a median to separate north- and southbound traffic, on the grounds of “public safety.” On the southern end of the bridge, the authority put up an eight-foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Fort Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protective net was even installed during the initial construction of the bridge—at enormous cost—to prevent workers from falling to their deaths. The net saved nineteen lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more than eighty years.
Now, why is this? Is it because the people managing the bridge are callous and unfeeling? Not at all. It’s because it is really hard for us to accept the idea that a behavior can be so closely coupled to a place. Over the years, the bridge authority periodically asked the public to weigh in on whether it supported the building of a suicide barrier. The letters generally fell into two categories: Those in favor tended to be people whose loved ones had committed suicide, who had some understanding of the psychology of the suicidal. The balance—in fact, the majority—simply dismissed the idea of coupling out of hand.
Here is a small sample:
“If a physical barrier on the bridge were to be erected, it would not surprise me if after three months, a suicide prone individual would walk to the north tower with a pistol and put the gun to his head in frustration of not being able to jump. What then of the millions to erect a physical suicide barrier?”
“People bent on suicide will find many ways to do away with themselves—pills, hanging, drowning, cutting arteries, jumping from any other bridge or building. Wouldn’t it be much better to spend the money on mental health care for many people instead of worrying about the few that jump off bridges?”
“I oppose the construction of a suicide barrier because it would waste money and achieve nothing. Anyone who was prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would find another, more destructive, way of killing himself or herself. Someone who jumps off a tall building would be much more likely to kill someone who is walking in the street than someone who jumps off the bridge into the water.”
“All it will do is cost money and deface the bridge. There are many ways to commit suicide. You take one away from someone it will only be replaced by another.”
In one national survey, three quarters of Americans predicted that when a barrier is finally put up on the Golden Gate Bridge, most of those who wanted to take their life on the bridge would simply take their life some other way.5 But that’s absolutely wrong. Suicide is coupled.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.
4.
Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct covers the neighborhood surrounding Greenwood Cemetery, from Prospect Expressway in the north to Bay Ridge in the south. In the narrow strip between the western perimeter of the cemetery and the waterfront, a series of streets run downhill toward the water. A crumbling, elevated freeway meanders down the middle. Today, it is a gentrifying neighborhood. Thirty years ago, when David Weisburd spent a year walking up and down those streets, it was not.
“This was a different world,” Weisburd remembers. “This was a scary place. You’d go into an apartment building, there’d be refrigerators in the hall, garbage would be in the halls. Apartment buildings would have backyards five feet deep in garbage. There were people on the streets who would scare the hell out of you.”