Suicide by jumping from a height

This article is about suicide. For those at risk, there is a wide network of offers of help in which ways out are shown. In acute emergencies, the telephone counseling and the European emergency number 112 can be reached continuously and free of charge. After an initial crisis intervention , qualified referrals can be made to suitable counseling centers on request.

The suicide by falling from a height , in short fall from a height (in the technical literature also called death jump , [suicide by] falling into depth , [suicide by] jumping from height and [suicide by] jumping into depth ) is a form of suicide in which a person kills himself with intent to die from a natural (e.g. a mountain or a cliff) or artificial (e.g. a house or bridge) elevation or falls from an airplane. In Germany around 9.1% of the recorded suicides are committed by falling from a height (as of 2013).

frequency

In Germany, falling from a height after hanging and self-poisoning with medication is currently the third most common suicide method of all fatal acts of suicide (status: surveys for the years 1998 to 2013). The number of all suicides carried out in this way has always been over 900 per year in recent years (2011: 917; 2012: 996; 2013: 915). The total number of people who died as a result of suicide by falling from a height in Germany between 1998 and 2012 is 14,679.

Suicide by falling from a height reached its highest rate in 2002, when 1,105 people died in this way in Germany. As a result, the number of suicides completed in this way steadily declined until 2008 (2008: 883), only to temporarily level off at more than 900 and less than 1,000 deaths per year after a low in 2010 (850 people) .

In terms of gender, falling from a height is continuously the third most common suicide method chosen by women in Germany and the fourth most frequently chosen suicide method among men: Between 2011 and 2013, 308, 366, 320 women and 609, 630, 595 died in Germany, respectively Men this way. Even around 1900, suicide by falling from a height was already considered a preferred method of suicide in the “women's world”.

In Austria, falling from a height also ranks third among the most common suicide methods chosen by women and fourth among the most common suicide methods by men (14% of all male suicides).

For England and Wales, the number of leaping suicides is given as 5% of all suicides.

The age group of 31 to 40 year olds is most frequently affected by suicide by falling from a height.

Medical knowledge and assessment

In the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), suicide by falling from a height is recorded under the codes E957 (9th revision, 1980) and X80 (10th revision 2006).

Suicide by falling from a height is considered a "hard suicide method", that is to say, a particularly violent and self-conquering practice of killing oneself. Surveys on the question of the psychological state of suicides who died in this way came to the result that almost 50% of all investigated cases of people who died by suicide by falling from a height had a psychiatric anamnesis . In the case of suicides who perish by falling from a height, according to the evaluations of autopsy reports, alcoholization at the time of the fall is rarely found, which suggests that the act is carried out impulsively and spontaneously or that the suicide's wish to die is so overwhelming that he does Deems self-anesthesia or indulging in courage unnecessary.

When falling from a height, death is usually caused by crushing the body or by destroying / damaging individual vital organs.

People who survive a suicide attempt by falling from a height suffer in most cases severe, often permanent, health damage. 3–5% of all paraplegia in German-speaking countries are caused by suicide attempts, most of them by failed suicide attempts by jumping from a height.

Since ancient times, suicides by leaping into the depths have been demonstrable as a religious and cultic act. The motives that in such cases of the act of committing suicide by jumping into the depths are mostly based on the fact that the person jumping wants to prove the firmness of his belief in a certain religious doctrine through his action or that this is how for the religious community, to which he belongs, wants to sacrifice.

The method of “jumping” as a means of bringing about death is also repeatedly used in the context of double suicides and group suicides: For example, in February 2000 an Austro-Norwegian couple jumped together from the 600 meter high Prekestolen on Lysefjord and took them in August 2001 three young people from Reichenbach with connections to the satanic scene committed themselves by jumping down together from the Göltzschaltbrücke in the Vogtland. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a trend that not only people who have been in a close personal relationship with one another for a long time commit suicide by jumping together, but also that people who previously did not know each other commit suicide together by jumping into the Realize depth after they have found each other through the communication and contact initiation possibilities that have arisen through the new medium of the Internet.

Differentiation between the causes of death "suicide by falling from a height" and "accidental death by falling from a height"

Data that were collected using the example of the city of Berlin for the years 1988 to 2004 suggest that more than 2/3 of all deaths from falls from a height represent suicides: this was 68.7% of those for the years mentioned in Berlin counted cases (compared to 18.4% proven accidents and 12.9% cases in which retrospectively the cause of death could no longer be clearly identified as suicide or accident).

In forensic medicine it has been established as a characteristic to differentiate between suicides and accidents caused by falling from a height , on the basis of empirical values acquired with fatal window falls , that the body of the dead is usually more in suicides caused by falling windows from great heights towards the middle of the street (i.e. relatively far away from the building), as it jumped off with a certain run-up, while victims of falling windows, which were accidents, tend to fall while they are about to fall to be held so that they come to rest relatively close to the building.

In 1979 G. Berghaus came to the conclusion that in the evaluation of 185 deaths after falling from a height, in which there was a clear criminological identification of the various individual cases as suicide or accident, that in 19 out of 20 cases in which the person fell more than 1 -2 meters from the vertical to the crash site, a suicide occurred, while at distances of less than 1–2 meters this was the case in only two out of eighteen cases. According to his investigations, the lack of protruding parts of the building in the course of the fall also suggests a suicide: out of twenty cases he examined showing these external characteristics, seventeen were suicides.

It was also found that falls from heights with increasing fall height represent more frequent suicides and fewer accidents: For example, in the fatal falls from the first floor recorded in Berlin between 1988 and 2004, only 23% were suicides, while among the falls from the 3rd floor in the same period 77%, for the falls from the 4th to 8th Floor 83%, in the falls from the 9th to 15th The first floor represented 92% suicides and all falls from higher floors represented 100% suicides.

Points of view

Jump suicide is widely considered to be a particularly "hard" and unpleasant form of suicide.

Fundamental opponents of the act of suicide naturally also reject jumping as a special variant for the practical execution of suicide, i. H. they disapprove of people resorting to this method of intentional death in the same way as they disapprove of people resorting to any other method of causing their own death.

But also people and organizations who defend the right to a self-determined death, such as B. the philosopher Jean Amery or the Swiss euthanasia organization EXIT , mostly reject suicide by jumping as a means of executing a suicide: On the one hand, because this way of killing oneself is usually viewed as particularly terrible and excruciating. And secondly, since the execution of a suicide by jumping carries the risk of endangering third parties in two respects: 1) Because people who intentionally throw themselves off a building, a bridge, a cliff, etc., when they hit others Can hit people (or vehicles with people in them) and injure or kill them. And 2) by the fact that people who find someone who has killed themselves by jumping from a great height can be traumatized by the sight that the dead person presents due to the visible severe external damage to his body. Correspondingly, supporters of the right to an autonomous death mostly advise not to choose the method of suicide by jumping out of consideration for uninvolved third parties who could be affected by it, but to resort to methods that do not involve the risk of physical harm Injury and killing as well as the unnecessarily severe traumatization of third parties can be managed. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been a subculture of chat rooms, forums and the like on the subject of suicide in the then newly emerged medium of the Internet, in which, as sociological studies show, decidedly positive and affirmative views on "jumping" can also be found.

Prevention

To prevent suicides from falling from heights, viewing platforms on high-rise buildings, on mountain peaks and other places, which experience has shown to attract potential suicides, have been equipped with high security fences or bars in numerous countries in the past few decades. Often these fences and grids are constructed in such a way that they curve inward in their upper sections, which is intended to make it even more difficult to climb over the fence.

Recently, bridges have increasingly been equipped with permanently installed steel safety nets that are supposed to catch "jumpers". In 2018, work began on assembling such a network across the entire length of the pedestrian walkway of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco , from which more than 1,700 people had thrown themselves to their deaths since it was built in 1937. The network will be largely invisible to pedestrians and motorists seven meters below the pedestrian path and protrude seven meters. Completion is scheduled for January 2021.

In Germany, similar networks were e.g. B. attached to the high bridge in Rottweil 2015, whereby monument protection, statics and bridge maintenance are to be considered.

The nets are intended to serve prevention and prevent suicides from jumping at all. If someone does jump, they end up on the net, here is the hope that they will end their suicide attempt here, either voluntarily or because they get stuck or are too injured to jump any further. The suicides cannot be prevented, only their number can be reduced. In Rottweil, on August 13, 2015, someone jumped first into the safety net, then from there to the ground and died in the process.

A net works according to the same principle as the bridge safety nets, which was installed in 1998 seven meters below the medieval terrace wall of the viewing terrace of the minster in the Swiss city of Bern , since then (as of 2015) no one has killed themselves there.

The installation of access barriers at the Sydney Harbor Bridge in 1934 reduced the number of suicides from 15 per year to 1 per year.

Suicide by leaping into the depths as a motif in art and literature

Since ancient times, depictions of suicides by leaping into the depths can be identified as a motif in literary works and representations of the visual arts: the motives of people who resort to this type of suicide in artistic works, suicide by deliberately falling into To take the depth are mostly either a) the intention to evade a fate that is in their eyes even worse, b) the intention to punish oneself for a serious mistake they have committed, or c) the intention to become a To sacrifice the good of others or a higher purpose.

One of the earliest verifiable fictional descriptions of suicide by jumping into the depths can be found in the ancient Greek myth of the seven against Thebes , in which the Theban prince Menoikeus throws himself from the city wall of Thebes into the lindworm moat that encompasses the city in order to fulfill a prophecy which says that the city can only be saved if he (Menoikeus) sacrifices his life.

In the ancient legend about the hero Theseus , Theseus' father Ageus, King of Athens, took his own life after mistakenly believing, due to a misunderstanding, that his son died fighting the monstrous Minotaur on the island of Crete by he throws himself off the cliffs of his hometown into the sea. The relevant section of the Mediterranean Sea is then named after Ägeus the Aegean Sea .

Andy Warhol processed a photo of Evelyn McHale's suicide in his work Suicide (Fallen Body) in 1962 .

The actor Al Mulock committed suicide during the filming of the western classic Spiel mir das Lied von Tod in 1968 by throwing himself out of the window of his hotel room in full film costume.

One of the best-known and most referenced suicides caused by falling into the depths in a recent artistic work is the final scene of the feminist adventure film Thelma and Louise from 1991: In this the two protagonists purposely race in a convertible into a gaping ravine while they hold hands to escape from what they consider to be a male-dominated world that oppresses them and makes a fulfilling existence impossible for them.

In the 1992 film adaptation of the novel The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper , the character of Alice Munro falls from a rock in one of the last scenes of the film after the young Mohican Uncas, with whom she fell in love, fell off the Huron chief Magua was killed in battle to follow her lover into death and to evade her threatened forced marriage with the cruel Huron chief.

At the end of the video game Red Dead Redemption , the outlaw Dutch van der Linde, the main antagonist of the game's protagonist, decides when he is cornered at the end of the main story of the game at the edge of a mountain in which he has been hiding to let himself fall backwards into the depths in order to avoid being captured by the authorities, which he hates because of his anarchist-liberal philosophy. He justified this in a final speech by saying that he could not help but fight because that was his nature and that he would rather die than give up the fight and be arrested. In addition, he explains that he has recognized that time has passed over him and his kind (the outlaws of the old Wild West) due to the spreading of modern civilization and the destruction of the uncontrolled, free, nature and that it was time for him to give way.

Contrary to what the title of the book suggests, the protagonist of Arthur Koestler's novel A Man Jumps into the Depth does not kill himself. In fact, his jump is just a metaphorical jump.

literature

Annette L. Beautrais / Madelyn S. Gould / Eric D. Caine: Preventing Suicide by Jumping from Bridges owned by the City of Ithaca and by Cornell University. Consultation to Cornell University "Extended Report" , 2010.
G. Berghaus: "Mathematical-statistical differentiation possibilities between suicide and accident when falling from a height", in: Zeitschrift für Rechtsmedizin , Vol. 80 (1979), pp. 273–286.
Ellen Pauline Fischer: Suicide by Jumping in the City of New York , Johns Hopkins University, 1988.
D. Gunnell / M. Nowers: "Suicide by Jumping", in: Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica , Vol. 96 (1), 1997, pp. 1-6.
M. Smerling: "Forensic medicine and criminalistic aspects when falling from a height", in: Archive for Criminology , 1977, pp. 40–50, 66–77, 177–187.
Henning von Rosen, "Leap or Life", Novum Pro Verlag, 2011

Individual evidence

↑ Of 10,076 recorded suicides, 915 were committed by falling from a height, see National Suizid Prevention Program for Germany: Suizide in Deutschland 2013 .

↑ National Suicide Prevention Program for Germany: Suizide in Deutschland 2012 ; National Suicide Prevention Program for Germany: Suizide in Deutschland 2012 ; National Suicide Prevention Program for Germany: Suizide in Deutschland 2013 .

↑ Hans Rost: The suicide as a social statistical phenomenon , 1905, p. 80.

↑ D. Gunnell, M. Nowers: Suicide by Jumping (Abstract) at Wiley Online Library.

↑ Stefanie Last: Fatal falls from heights in the state of Berlin from 1988 to 2004. Injury patterns depending on the height of the fall , Berlin 2013, p. 94.

↑ EE Türk / M Tsokos: Pathologic Features of Fatal Falls from Height , in: American Journal of Forensic Medicine 2004, Vol. 25, pp. 194-199.

↑ M. Smerling: Forensic medicine and criminalistic aspects when falling from heights, in: Archiv für Kriminologie 1977, pp. 40–50, 66–77, 177–187; H. Elbel: About fall injuries, in: Life insurance medicine, 1st special issue, 40 (1966), p. 40f.

↑ J. Eisenhuth: Suizid und paraplegia, abstract of a lecture, held on the occasion of the 25th annual conference of the German-speaking Medical Society for Paraplegia on June 22, 2012 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .@1@ 2

↑ Asche im Netz, in: Der Spiegel from February 28, 2000

^ "Group suicide: leap into hell", in: Tagesspiegel in August 27, 2001 .

↑ Schmidtke, A., Schaller, S., Kruse, A. (2003): “Contagion phenomena in the new media - does the Internet promote double suicides and suicide clusters?”, In: E. Etzersdorfer, G. Fiedler, M. Witte (eds .): New media and suicidal tendencies , pp. 150–167, here especially p. 160; "Internet. Blind date on suicide ”, in: Der Spiegel from February 23, 2000 .

↑ Stefanie Last: Fatal falls from heights in the State of Berlin from 1988 to 2004. Injury patterns depending on the height of the fall , Berlin 2013, p. 25.

↑ G. Berghaus: Mathematical-statistical differentiation possibilities between suicide and accident when falling from a height, in: Zeitschrift für Rechtsmedizin, Vol. 80 (1979), pp. 273–286.

↑ Stefanie Last: Fatal falls from heights in the state of Berlin from 1988 to 2004. Injury patterns depending on the height of the fall , Berlin 2013, p. 27.

↑ Cf. the anthology Neue Medien und Suizidalität , 2003, passim. So z. B. Jürgen Schramm: "Online Forums and Chats", pp. 112–122 or Armin Schmidtke / Sylvia Schaller / Anja Kruse: "Contagion phenomena in the new media - the Internet promotes double suicides and suicide clusters", pp. 150–162, esp 160-162.