The Golden Gate: A Bridge Too Deadly?

Two years earlier, gripped by the depression that left him feeling worthless and inept, especially at work, he had attempted suicide using pills and alcohol. Now he twice counted to 10, leapt the low rail and thought:

" 'I can't believe that my life made this turn, so I have to do this.'

"I was just flabbergasted," Baldwin said, "that this is where it took me, and this is where it was all going to end."

'They Think We're a Bunch of Goofballs'

The most stubborn belief against a barrier is that it would be pointless because people intent on ending their lives would find somewhere else to do it.

"They think we're a bunch of goofballs," said Kevin Hines, who leapt from the Golden Gate in September 2000, immediately regretted doing so, and frantically swung his body in the four seconds it took to travel 25 stories. He entered feet-first.

Fished from San Francisco Bay by the Coast Guard cutter on constant standby below the bridge, Hines emerged from a coma after 40 days. He now serves on the San Francisco Mental Health Board.

"They say, like, if people want to kill themselves, they're just going to do it anyway," he said.

The assembled evidence indicates otherwise. Experts point first to Britain, where for decades the coal gas piped into homes for heat proved an extraordinarily handy method for self-destruction.

"A little suicide parlor in the home," said Richard Seiden, a retired psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Yet when utilities replaced coal gas with less-toxic natural gas, the national suicide rate plummeted. "They didn't go out and get knives," Seiden said.

Advocates note that British authorities reached past the taboos that swirl about suicide to address it as a public health issue. Understanding that reducing "easy access to lethal means" translates into saved lives, the Brits stopped the sale of non-steroidal painkillers in bulk, making the pills available only in blister packs.

"To get a lethal dose of ibuprofen, you get a very sore thumb," said Eve R. Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. The volunteer organization, the oldest in the country, trains staff members and volunteers answering suicide hotlines to "go after the weapon," Meyer said. "First, you try to find out how they want to kill themselves: Get it unloaded, untied, rolled across the floor. Distance is time, and time is your friend."