Newsgroups: tor.general
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!laredo
From: laredo@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Alain Laredo)
Subject: Re: Suicides
Message-ID: <8901262028.AA03552@queen.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
Distribution: tor
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 89 15:28:45 EST

In article Message-ID: <373.1989Jan24.13:01:24@hammer.me.toronto.edu>
hammer@me writes:

>>In article <8901240935.AA01848@bloor.csri.toronto.edu> tjhorton@csri.toronto.edu (Tim Horton) writes:
>>
>>(You can jump from a bridge, or borrow a gun, or inject nasty stuff, or take
>>up smoking...  or pehaps simultaneously take up cocaine and riding racehorses
>>and LSD at rock concerts and driving stolen cars very dangerously [sick, Tim])
>>
>You don't understand.  These people have such severe problems, they feel their
>only recourse is to "end it all".  I imagine them, not as chronically ill
>cancer patients, who can no longer stand the pain, but as desperate, bitter
>people.  Who, if they're going to commit suicide, are going to do so with a
>bang, "I'm going to kill myself, and I want the whole fucking world to know".
>Their final (and likely only) moment of "glory".

	First of all, in most of the subway lines of the world there is the policy
to keep silence about any attempt of suicide or death due to suicide, so
people will be discouraged to try to kill themselves using a subway.

	Second, about forty per cent of the people that try to suicide on
subway lines survive the impact of the train and end underneath the
platform. The real purpose of this space under the platform is to 
protect a person that accidentally falls and doesn't have time to go 
up again. Anyway, this 40% either have a very slow and
painful death or remain crippled for the rest of their life.

	So if you really want the whole f...... world to know be more
creative, for example hang yourself from the CN-Tower, shoot yourself in
Queen's Park, dive in the lake from Harbourfront, jump from First
Canadian Place at rush hour, etc. For sure many people
will notice you and probably you will appear in all the Newspapers and
radio and tv stations. And most important, you will have a higher probability
of success.

	A final point, in Japan, according to a friend, trying to avoid  
suicides in the subway, if a person kills himself, his family will have
to pay for all the man-hours that were lost due to the fact.

                                         Jim Laredo