The Urge to End It All: The Ellington Bridge

This article is by far one of the most useful ways to understand suicide in a rational sense, and the following posts are concerning topics discussed in the article. I strongly recommend reading the full article. (Original Article by Scott Anderson)

Jumping off a bridge is one of the most impulsive ways for someone to commit suicide, and there are a number of people who study the way it works.


One study was concerning the Ellington Bridge in Washington D.C..

"Running perpendicular to the Ellington, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below — about 125 feet — it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two."

In order to prevent more suicides, a barrier was proposed to stop people from jumping. The group of people who proposed the idea were met with the argument "if they don't jump off the bridge, they will find another way".

Well it turns out this is not necessarily true.

The barrier was indeed established, and the suicides on the Ellington dropped to zero. Now if the people were just going to "find another way" they could have easily walked a few hundred yards to the Taft bridge and jumped the identical height, but the Taft bridge's suicide rate did not even surpass two people a year, the same as it was before.