Author: vaughanbell

Orchids, dandelions and cognitive genetics

The Atlantic has an excellent article on how our assumptions about genetic vulnerability to mental illness may be misplaced, as many studies have missed out how the same genetic factors may cause people to thrive but only in quite specific circumstances.

One of the difficulties with psychiatry research is that it often has a sample bias, a blind spot if you will, as it typically studies people who turn up in front of mental health professionals because they’re a problem to themselves or others.

It finds social, psychological or biological factors associated with the problem and then speculates that these might be involved in causing the problem.

Many times throughout history, however, it has later been discovered that perfectly functional people have the same traits but they weren’t specifically looked for and so weren’t included when the theories were devised.

In this case, the article tackles how genes originally identified as ‘risk factors’ for mental illness, could, in fact, be equally well conceived of as ‘sensitivity factors’ that heighten response to all situations.

When these situations include tragedy, abuse, or what in the medical literature are euphemistically called ‘life events’ (essentially, the shit in ‘shit happens’) the result may be an increased chance of mental illness, but when the situations are positive, life-enhancing opportunities, this extra sensitivity may lead to better outcomes.

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness.

Link to Atlantic article ‘The Science of Success’.

Emulating the brain on a chip

Discover Magazine has an article on an innovative project to create silicon chips which work like neurons. If you’re thinking these are standard digital chips that run neural network software you’d be wrong, they’re part-analogue devices that are specifically built to emulate the physical operation of brain cells.

The article riffs on the work of neuroscientist Kwabena Boahen who leads the ‘Brains in Silicon’ project.

If you’re not familiar with the difference between analogue and digital calculation it’s worth just briefly getting to grips with it so you can see how revolutionary this project is.

Most computer chips are digital. They encode numbers as lists of 0s and 1s because they are made up of millions of transistors which can switch on (a ‘1’) and off (a ‘0’). The chip can then do operations or maths on the numbers, by flipping the switches, depending on what functions are built-in and how software makes use of them.

So if you wanted to calculate, lets say, how fast a crowd of people walk through a door, you would need to enter numbers for the size of the door, how fast the people are walking, the amount of interference caused by jostling and crowding and your mathematical formulae which ties it all together. The chip would do the calculation, and you would get your answer.

An analogue calculation is more more like a simulation. For example, you might find that ball bearings and a funnel give you a good approximation of the answer. You just change the size of the funnel, the number of ball bearings and the pressure from behind and you just observe what is happening to get the answer. It might not be as pinpoint accurate, but its much easier to build and run.

The traditional approach to artificial neural networks is the first. Each virtual neuron is a mathematical simulation of the electrical and chemical processes and how it influences other virtual neurons. This needs huge amounts of calculations because each of the simulated neurons is mathematically complex and any change means every connected neuron needs also to be recalculated.

This is the approach taken by the Blue Brain Project and it is no accident that they use one of the world’s biggest supercomputers to run the simulation.

This is where Boahen’s project comes in. While the traditional digital approach is very accurate, its very time and energy intensive. While the Blue Brain project needs a warehouse of tech to support it, the actual noisy error-prone brain runs in the space of a bag of Doritos.

So instead of going for the pinpoint accuracy of digital simulation, Boahen has created chips that are an analogue simulation, or really, an analogue emulation of neurons.

As neurons use electrical impulses, much of their function can be described as electrical circuits. In fact, the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the neuron can be drawn as an electrical circuit.

So instead of writing mathematical equations to simulate the circuit and then getting a chip to do the digital calculations, you could just build the circuit. Using the circuit would tell you exactly how the neuron would behave.

Complete neurons are more complex than the simple Hodgkin–Huxley circuit (which just aims to describe the electrical action potential signal) but the same approach applies. Instead of building a chip to run digital simulations of circuits, just build the circuits. The result is noisy, dirty but fast, very low power and good enough Рjust like the human brain.

We covered Boahen’s work back in 2007 and there’s a great talk he did which introduces the project, but the Discover article is a great update on the research which has the potential to turn neurally inspired computing on its head.

It also has loads of background information and is a great introduction to how the brain deals with its noisy and surprisingly unreliable neurons.

Link to Discover article on brain chips.

Like a hole in the head: a very medical tribute

Harvey Cushing was not only a pioneering neurosurgeon but a fantastic artist, as can be seen from his amazing scientific illustrations. It turns out, he gave a few below-the-radar tributes in his drawings, as he based several illustrations of brain surgery ‘patients’ on portraits of his colleagues.

On the left is a drawing from Cushing’s 1908 book Surgery: Its Principles and Practice. It shows a craniotomy in a patient with a gunshot wound that had damaged the motor cortex (actually, I’ve flipped this image so it better matches the picture below).

The image at the bottom is a portrait of the Canadian physician William Osler, and you can see that the ‘patient’ is really a portrait of Osler.

Apparently, the two men had a warm friendship and a strong mutual admiration:

Osler and Cushing became firm friends, with their common bond a scholarly interest in medical biography and an avid love of books. Geoffrey Jefferson graciously assessed Cushing’s ties with Osler:

“The friendship which sprang up between the two proved to be a vital factor in his life, and probably no less in Osler’s‚Ķ. No special reason requires to be shown for matters of feeling; not the least was that they just liked one another a lot. They shared ideals in the meaning and the uses of the medical life in its highest intellectual plane, as well as at a humanitarian level, as the similarities of their writings on these subjects show”…

After Osler’s death in 1919, responding to the invitation of Lady Osler, Cushing spent 5 years writing his monumental opus, The Life of Sir William Osler. Published in two volumes, it was awarded a Pulitzer prize for literature

I found this interesting snippet in a great article on the history of modern brain surgery in a 2003 article from the Journal of Neurosurgery.

Link to PubMed entry for history of neurosurgery article.

Alien hands in fiction

Alien or anarchic hand syndrome is where you lose conscious control of one of your hands after brain damage, to the point where it seems to have a ‘will of its own’. There’s a great short article in this month’s Cortex examining how this curious phenomenon has appeared in fiction.

Famously, something similar appears in the film Dr Strangelove to the point where the disorder is sometimes called the ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’.

But it turns out that self-directed hands have also appeared in numerous other works of fiction. I was particularly taken by this plot device:

The phenomenon is usually accounted for as resulting from lesions to the contralateral Supplementary Motor Area (SMA). However, it has also been associated to the severance of the Corpus Callosum and William Boyd, in his short story, ‘‘Bizarre Situations’’, from the collection ‘‘On the Yankee Station’’, embraced this anatomical interpretation of the syndrome. The main character of this novel, who underwent a callosotomy, does not know whether or not his left hand shot his best friend’s wife dead.

The Cortex article is by neuropsychologist Sergio Della Salla who has done a great deal of the research on this condition himself and who also wrote a great article on the condition for The Psychologist back in 2005.

However, it misses out one of the most famous depictions of a hand with a ‘mind of its own’ – from the film The Evil Dead II – where Ash’s hand becomes possessed and he ends up having to chainsaw it off. There’s a clip of the scene here, which is a bit icky if you’re not into that sort of thing.

Link to ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’ in literature.

Straight outta Bedlam

I’ve just found an odd study on whether rap and heavy rock music encourages ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in psychiatric patients when compared to easy listening and country tunes.

It sounds like it could be something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but as I don’t have access to the full text, I’m still not sure what the ‘inappropriate behaviours’ were (air guitar? MC Hammer trousers?)

A comparison of the effects of hard rock and easy listening on the frequency of observed inappropriate behaviors: control of environmental antecedents in a large public area.

Journal of Music Therapy. 1992 Spring;29(1):6-17.

Harris CS, Bradley RJ, Titus SK.

Observation of clients at a state mental health hospital by direct care staff indicated that they appeared to act in more inappropriate ways when “hard rock” or “rap” music was played in an open courtyard than when “easy listening” or “country” music was played. A study was conducted to compare the inappropriate behavior of clients when hard rock and rap music were played (21 days), followed by easy listening and country and western music (21 days). This comparison was followed by a reversal phase in which hard rock and rap music were again played (18 days). The behaviors of the clients were observed and recorded via a controlled methodology. The results demonstrated that more inappropriate behavior was observed under conditions in which hard rock and rap music were played than when easy listening and country western music were played. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for music study.

Psychiatric tales

Darryl Cunningham draws amazing comics about psychiatry and mental illness, drawn from his time working as a student nurse on psychiatric wards.

His comic strip Psychiatric Tales has been regularly appearing online and he’s just posted the amazing and heartfelt last chapter along with an announcement that the series is to be published as a book by Blank Slate Publishing in February.

If you want to get a feel for Cunningham’s work, set aside some time and have a look at some of the piece at the links below – they’re well worth the time.

People With Mental Illness Enhance Our Lives

Dementia Ward

Suicide

Schizophrenia

Cut and Delusions

Last Chapter

The strips are brilliantly written and drawn, and do something quite rare in discussion of mental illness – they manage to capture both the experience of people with psychiatric difficulties and the experience of the staff caring for them.

There are other chapters on his website so do go and have a look. Fantastic stuff.

Link to Darryl Cunningham’s blog.

2009-11-06 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

<img align="left" src="http://mindhacks-legacy.s3.amazonaws.com/2005/01/spike.jpg&quot; width="102" height="120"

What should count as an illness in the DSM-V? Asks Psychiatric Times with a brief discussion on the concepts of mental disorder.

Addiction Inbox is a fantastic blog about drug abuse and addiction.

There’s an excellent article on the anthropology of office gossip over at The New York Times.

New Scientist reports on a convicted murderer who got a reduced sentence on appeal owing to the fact he has a version of the MAOA gene that has been linked to an increase chance of aggression. Biological determinism alive and well in the Italian courts. Is that the ghost of Lombroso I see?

Recently sacked drugs advisor to the UK government writes a scathing editorial in New Scientist. There’s also some good commentary in the British Medical Journal from psychopharmacologist David Colquhoun.

CNN reports on a case of a women who experiences transient global amnesia after sex.

The highs and lows of transcranial magnetic stimulation are discussed by Inkling Magazine.

The New York Times reports on female soldiers from the US military who have suffered post-traumatic stress.

A recent study that contradicts the child bipolar over-excitement is covered by Furious Seasons.

Neuroskeptic has some excellent coverage of a recent study comparing the effects of real vs placebo coffee.

A vintage public information film on psychoanalysis apparently from the late 1940s makes for fascinating viewing on YouTube.

New Scientist meets Terry Pratchett to talk about his work and his diagnosis of an uncommon form of Alzheimer’s disease.

Research on what increases altruism in toddlers in covered by the wonderful BPS Research Digest.

Frontal Cortex muses on several studies showing the mental impact of a bad night’s sleep.

Internet pant-wetters take note. A new study from the Pew Research Center finds that internet users are more social offline than non-users and that internet use isn’t linked to social isolation. Good coverage from CNET.

Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent post on how new born babies’ cries have a recognisable ‘accent‘, depending on native language.

A new documentary about psychedelic drugs is previewed by Dr Shock.

New Scientist has a good article on why good decision making and IQ aren’t necessarily linked.

What’s the best way to take a study break? asks Cognitive Daily with the research to back up the answer. My answer of ‘fly to Jamaica’ is apparently not evidence-based.

The New York Times discusses how Asperger syndrome may be taken out of the forthcoming revised diagnostic manual and merged into a single autism spectrum diagnosis.

The US airforce apparently want top ‘overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities’ with something biosciencey, according to a new research effort covered by Wired’s Danger Room.

The Guardian has what seems to be the best obituary of legendary and hugely influential anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, probably because it was written by a fellow anthropologist.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has a ‘very simple argument against any general theory of consciousness’ on his blog The Splintered Mind.

New Scientist has a short news piece on how we can sense our heartbeat with our skin.

Another nice piece on self-deception research, this time on how we over-estimate our ability to resist impulses, is discussed by Neuronarrative. The correct link to the original study is here.

The Neuroscience Boot Camp annual summer crash course held at the University of Pennsylvania is recruiting!

Psychologist says

I’ve discovered that if you search for “says psychologist” on Google, you get a giant avalanche of wtf. I encourage you to try it for yourself, but here are a few of the highlights, all taken from headlines of news stories.

Twitter makes you dumb, says psychologist
Boys have it worse, says psychologist
Faith schools breed terrorism, says psychologist
Change is possible for gays, says psychologist
Music tugs at monkeys’ hearts, says psychologist
Pakistan no longer fear failure, says psychologist
Killer of 4 feared loss of love, says psychologist
Britney has lost control and needs help, says psychologist

You get the idea. There are plenty more where they came from.

As has been noted by Dr Petra for a while now, you can get virtually anything, and anyone, into the media just by describing them as a psychologist, even when they aren’t.

We are at a point in history where there is a huge popular interest in the mind and brain and so psychological sounding explanations are given huge weight and plenty of airtime.

If you have a look at the stories brought up by the “says psychologist” search you’ll notice that they range from charlatans giving their opinion on celebrities they’ve never met to the results of research published in the scientific literature, and everything in between.

But no matter, because it can all be condensed into the handy format of “…says psychologist”. This seems to be such a pervasive format that even the American Psychological Association use it for press releases.

Actually, I’ve just discovered that if you search Google Images for the same you get a stream of random images with “says psychologist” underneath. It’s kind of poetic in a surreal sort of way.

Link to “says psychologist” search.

The mind and brain in 2010

The latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online.

I might immodestly recommend the piece on ‘neurosecurity‘ and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to have it selected as one of the ‘ideas of the future’ by Wired UK.

There’s also a fascinating piece on ‘hyperopia‘ – a cognitive bias where people falsely assume they’ll be happier in the future by forgoing an indulgent pleasure and doing something ‘sensible’ that will benefit the long-term.

It was described by psychologists Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz and their original paper is available online as a pdf. It’s a lovely flip-side to the self-control research, that has shown the ability to delay gratification predicts success in a number of areas of life. Hyperopia demonstrates that this ability can make people worse off if used in excess.

There’s also a couple of great pieces on the interface between psychology and technology.

The article on ‘bionic noticing‘ discusses how portable networked devices both allow us to be passively alerted to things in our environment through location specific information sources but also how simply having the technology can change of awareness: for example, the ability to instantly post pictures online from mobile devices can change how we look at the environment.

There’s also a piece on ‘digital forgetting‘, arguing that the ability to permanently store photos, conversations and social network interactions is a bug, not a feature, and we need to build in forgetting processes to facilitate to the traditional social practice of ‘putting things behind us’.

The print version has lots of other breaking ideas for 2010 which are not available online, including a piece by me on ‘networked drugs’.

Link to Wired UK neurosecurity article.
Link to Wired UK hyperopia article.
Link to Wired UK bionic noticing article.
Link to Wired UK digital forgetting article.

Full disclosure: I’m contributing editor at Wired UK and my neural implant has no password.

Dr Smile

The Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile. If I’m not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team:

Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;98:154-6.

Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly G, Simon L, Takács B.

A high fidelity Virtual Human Interface (VHI) system was developed using low-cost and portable computers. The system features real-time photo-realistic digital replicas of multiple individuals capable of talking, acting and showing emotions and over 60 different facial expressions. These virtual patients appear in a high-performance virtual reality environment featuring full panoramic backgrounds, animated 3D objects, behavior and AI models, a complete vision system for supporting interaction and advanced animation interfaces. The VHI takes advantage of the latest advances in computer graphics. As such, it allows medical researchers and practitioners to create real-time responsive virtual humans for their experiments using computer systems priced under $2000.

Link to PubMed entry for Dr Smile re-invention.

I only read it for the articles

The Economist has a delightful article on how we self-justify our dubious behaviour after the event using spurious reasons. It turns out we often deceive ourselves into believing that our hastily constructed justifications are genuinely what motivated us.

The article riffs on a recent study by marketing researchers Zoë Chance and Michael Norton, who asked male students to choose between two specially created sports magazines.

One had more articles, but the other featured more sports. When a participant was asked to rate a magazine, one of two magazines happened to be a special swimsuit issue, featuring beautiful women in bikinis.

When the swimsuit issue was the magazine with more articles, the guys said they valued having more articles to read and chose that one. When the bikini babes appeared in the publication with more sports, they said wider coverage was more important and chose that issue.

This, as it turns out, is a common pattern in studies of this kind, and crucially, participants are usually completely unaware that they are post-justifying their choices.

This may not seem surprising: the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper. But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon, and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean. Managers, for example, have been found to favour male applicants at hypothetical job interviews by claiming that they were searching for a candidate with either greater education or greater experience, depending on the attribute with which the man could trump the woman. In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room was showing the same film, but decamped when the movie in the next room was different (thus being able to claim that they were not avoiding the disabled person but just choosing a different film to watch). As Ms Chance puts it: “People will do what they want to do, and then find reasons to support it.”

Further compounding the problem, Ms Chance and Mr Norton’s subjects, like the subjects of the similar experiments, showed little sign of being aware that they were merely using a socially acceptable justification to look at women in swimsuits. Mr Norton reports that when he informs participants that they were acting for different reasons than they claimed, they often react with disbelief.

I recommend reading the original study. It’s very accessibly written, and if you read nothing else, skip to page 9 (page 10 of the pdf file) and read the section entitled ‘Are People Aware That They are Justifying?’.

One of the key insights from psychology and one of the most practically applicable findings (particularly in clinical work) is that people’s explanations for why they do something are not necessarily a reliable guide to what influences their behaviour.

This also goes for ourselves and there are probably many areas in our life where we justify our actions, good or bad, with comfortable, plausible, fantasies.

 
Link to Economist piece ‘The conceit of deceit’.
Link to study text.

Brain wave furniture

The Neurocritic has found this wonderful designer sofa made around EEG or ‘brain wave’ data captured from artist Lucas Maassen, who also created the wonderful piece of furniture.

There’s more about the construction of the piece on a page on Maassen’s website, but it’s running a bit slow at the moment, so you may need to be a bit patient for it to load.

However, there’s more about the piece at The Neurocritic who also picks up on an update to the neuroscience of EEG alpha wave activity, stereotypically thought to reflect nothing more than a ‘state of relaxation’ in times past, but now known to be involved in a much wider rage of active brain processes.

Link to The Neurocritic on The Electroencephalographer’s Couch.
Link to Maassen’s Brain Wave Sofa page.

Johnson and the Nutt Sack

As regular readers will know, we often note the passing of the regular British ritual where the UK government asks a group of scientific advisers to give evidence on the harmfulness of drugs and then ignores them.

The unwritten rule is that everyone feigns mild exasperation and then goes about their business as if nothing had happened, but the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has gone and spoiled the party by firing neuroscientist David Nutt, the head of the drugs advisory committee, for, well, waving that damned evidence about.

The home secretary’s officially sacked the chief adviser for breaking what turns out to be a non-existent rule about discussing government policy in a recent lecture – using the carefully mischosen words “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy”.

Subsequently, two other scientists from the advisory committee have resigned and both the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor and the Science Minister expressed their dismay.

An evidence free drugs policy isn’t a British speciality, unfortunately, as shown by a recent World Health Organisation study that showed that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

So why did the home secretary break the unwritten rule about quietly ignoring the evidence in the service of some pointless sabre rattling? Surely nothing to do with the fact that a general election is coming up.

Rare ‘shell shock’ footage online

One of the most important films in the history of psychiatry, depicting treatment of ‘shell shocked’ British soldiers during World War One, has just been made freely available online by UK medical charity the Wellcome Trust who are currently releasing lots of their archive footage.

The film was made by Sir Arthur Hurst in 1917 when large numbers of soldiers with ‘shell shock’, later to be called ‘war neurosis’, were returning from the front – in this case to a make-shift military hospital in South Devon, England, which was previously an agricultural college.

Time and time again you’ll read in news articles that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the new name for what used to be called ‘shell shock’ but this is false and you can easily see why in the film.

The most prominent symptoms of the World War One patients are ‘hysterical’ symptoms. These are symptoms that appear to be due to nervous system damage (such as paralysis, tremor or blindness, to name but a few) despite the fact that it is possible to demonstrate that the parts of the nervous system involved in the seemingly impaired ability are working perfectly fine.

A long-standing idea is that these impairment are caused by the subconscious mind ‘converting’ emotional distress into physical symptoms, but there is little good evidence to say whether this is likely or not.

These conditions are now diagnosed as ‘conversion disorder‘ or ‘dissociative disorder‘ and, while it is accepted that trauma may play a role in triggering them it is not a requirement.

This makes it quite different from PTSD, which requires the patient to have experienced a traumatic event and that includes symptoms of hyperarousal (feeling ‘on edge’), having intrusive memories of the event, and avoiding reminders of the trauma.

As we’ve discussed before on Mind Hacks, PTSD was a direct result of the Vietnam war (indeed, it was originally called ‘post-Vietnam’ syndrome) and was partly introduced as a way of allowing veterans to get treatment for their war-trauma-related psychiatric difficulties.

The 1917 film was hugely important because it unequivocally showed to a wide audience that mental stress could lead to dramatic physical difficulties, highlighting the importance of psychiatry which was often considered to be a ‘second rate’ medical speciality.

It is also an important historical document because it shows some dramatic symptoms that rarely appear in such a stark form and also outlines the treatments of the day.

The first patient seen is Pte. Meek, age 23. He has complete retrograde amnesia, hysterical paralysis, contractures, mutism and universal anaesthesia. There is a shot of him in a wheelchair with a nurse, and the intertitles explain that he is completely unaware of the efforts to overcome the rigidity of his ankles, and a man is seen trying to bend his feet. He had a sudden recovery of memory nine months later, with gradual recovery of body functions. Seven months after this we see him teaching basket-making, which was his peacetime job. Two and a half years after onset he makes a complete recovery, and there is a shot of him running up and down stairs waving his arms.

The next patient is Pte. Preston, who has amnesia, word blindness and word deafness, except to the word ‘bombs’, and his response to this is shown. When a doctor says ‘bombs’, he dives under a bed. Pte Ross Smith is also seen, who has a facial spasm. The spasm ceases under hypnosis, but return on waking. He has a lateral tremor of the head, treatment being relaxation and passive movements. There is a shot of him lying in bed having his head moved around.

You can watch the film at the Wellcome website, or they’ve uploaded it as five parts to YouTube. The first part is here and you can click through the rest.

Link to film and info from the Wellcome Trust.
Link to first part on YouTube.

Final destination, Golden Gate Bridge

Photo by Flickr user yuzu. Click for sourceThere’s a remarkable article on the world’s most popular suicide spot, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, in the latest American Journal of Psychiatry.

The article has several case studies of people who have died from jumping from the bridge and some fascinating quotes from one of the few people who have survived their attempts.

It is full of curious snippets of information, and one of the clearest things to come through from the article is that the bridge has a sort of iconic attraction for those wanting to kill themselves (indeed, in hindsight, the name itself seems darkly ironic).

This is not just a morbidly romantic statement, it seems to be backed up by research:

Evidence that the Golden Gate Bridge serves as a suicide magnet is provided by Seiden and Spence’s study of individuals who jumped from either the Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge, both of which connect to San Francisco. The bridges were built within 1 year of each other, have similar heights, and are similarly lethal to jumpers. Seiden and Spence looked at individuals who drove onto either bridge to kill themselves. (They excluded suicides in which the person walked onto either bridge, as the Golden Gate Bridge has pedestrian access while the Bay Bridge does not.)

They found that between 1937 and 1979, 58 people drove across the Bay Bridge to commit suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. However, no one drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide from the Bay Bridge. This suggests that the Golden Gate Bridge has a powerful association with suicide in the minds of some individuals, to the extent that they would drive over one potentially lethal bridge to die at another.

The article also mentions some other facts: the idea that the death is painless is a myth – jumpers die from massive heart, chest or nervous system injuries or by drowning; jumping from the bridge has a 99% fatality rate; there are only 28 known survivors; the suicide rate is counted solely on recovered bodies, bodies washed out to sea, jumpers witnessed but not found, and unclaimed cars in the parking lot are not counted.

The article reminds me of the uncomfortable 2006 film The Bridge about people who jumped from the bridge.

It’s uncomfortable viewing because it is one of the few documentaries to address the life history, psychological state, motivations and final moments of people who committed suicide (akin to the ‘psychological autopsy‘ used by professionals), but also because it was made in quite an unethical way.

The filmmakers asked permission to place cameras near the bridge to capture the landscape, but instead filmed jumpers. They then contact the families of those who had died and interviewed them about the persons’ life but without informing them that they’d got film of them dying.

The result is a equally fascinating, insightful, tragic and disturbing and I’ve never settled how comfortable I am with the final product.

The American Journal of Psychiatry article finishes by recommending, on the basis of good evidence, that a suicide barrier would prevent deaths at the bridge.

One of the clearest findings in suicide research is that reducing access to lethal methods reduces suicide (going against the myth that ‘if someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll always find a way’).

Apparently, after much discussion a barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge has been agreed, but it is stalled while surveys are carried out and no final completion date has been agreed.

Link to PubMed entry for Golden Gate Bridge article.