SUICIDES AND OPPORTUNITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 249, 20 October 1928, Page 8

SUICIDES AND OPPORTUNITY.

The magistrate's suggestion that Graftoa Bridge should be wired shows a lack of knowledge of human mentality. It is true that to look down from the top of a tower or other eminences appears to "draw" many to eartlt but for this effect to be felt there mast to no barrier between the person looking down and the ground. Grafton Bridge has so high a barrier that unless the parapet is fint mounted the passing pedestrian is protected from the psychological snggestion of a dive to the bottom of the gully. Suggestions ofsniride would be in the mind of everybody who noted an added wire guard, and a determined woull* be suicide is not to be checked by anything less than physical restraint, unless, like the London Monument, there is a complete eagt erected. In every house where there is a gas stove there exists an invitation to suicide leaf horrifying than a death dive and the possibility of suffering—instant death is not the invariant result of a long-distance fall—and the eomags required to mount a high parapet and man the dive argues a deeper cause than tk* momentary prompting of & glance into depths through an opening in a high protecting wmH, The suicide will consider his braces, or a boot* lace, or a strip of shirting as a means to an end, and the wish to "fling himself away" is peculiar to a certain type of the mentally afflicted. I have had the care of a young ma* who felt this wish to drop from a height evan when he was seated in a ground floor smoktef room. He ultimately tore down iron toit from a bedroom window for the satisfaction ti his desire. MALE NURSE.