The Bridge

This past Sunday, as the disappointing first winter storm of the season approached, M and I decided to be lazy and not leave the warmth of our house.

I have wanted to see the movie The Bridge ever since Howard Stern talked about how great it was. It finally appeared on the Independent Film Channel a few months ago so we set the DVR, where it's been ever since.

In case you are unfamiliar with this movie, it's a documentary filmed over the course of 2004. In that year, cameras were filming the Golden Gate Bridge daily and recorded the 24 suicides that took place in that time. Interspersed with this footage are interviews with the various friends and families of the victims and the people on the bridge and in the water below that witness their desperate final acts.

While the premise seems grim, it is a fantastic movie. It is gut wrenching to literally watch a human being fall to their death, especially after you hear his friends or parents talking about the days, months and years leading up to those four seconds. But these interviews are frank, endearing and eye-opening. You would think that the survivors would be sobbing, screaming about what they could have done to stop it, but most of them speak matter-of-factly. They state that this person was determined to end their life and that, one way or another, their loved one was going to do it.

Many of the victims suffered from severe mental illness, and their families seem to find some solace in the fact that the person is finally free.

I've posted before that I had a friend that took his own life. I don't know the circumstances (the how, the when or the why), but I know that he must have been more desperate than I could ever possibly understand. Suicide seems to be the last hush-hush cause of death. There are so many obits in the paper that read "stricken at home", which many times means suicide.

Suicide is basically death resulting from a mental illness, just as a fatal heart attack is death resulting from coronary disease. Why, in our society of vagina flashing celebutards, is something like suicide still considered taboo?

I think open discussion about suicide, and how it affects the people that are left behind, is so important. I read an article a few years ago (months after we lost our friend) that said suicide is third leading cause of death for people between 15 and 24.

It's 2007 and we still live in a world where mental illness is something to be ashamed of and suicide is something to be whispered about. How sad is that?