Spot the jumper

>> The metro’s anti-suicide campaign leaves some people feeling targeted

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Photo by Jason Felker

What does a potential suicide look like? According to the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), anyone who looks depressed or distraught is a potential jumper. That’s the thinking behind its campaign urging commuters to approach people they think may commit suicide and talk to them, or to pick up red emergency phones encased in glass on subway platforms and alert metro security. And it has irritated at least one mental health rights organization.

“We reacted strongly to this campaign because we feel people with mental problems are being targeted because they are easily identified,” says Ghislain Goulet, a spokesperson for Action Autonomie. “These calls could be about you. Because any citizen can call [security], people are feeling afraid.”

Goulet thinks the campaign, which wraps up at the end of March, unfairly targets people with mental disabilities—a situation made worse if uniformed security agents get involved.
“This is a bad situation for people who have already had some sort of run-in with security or police,” Goulet says. “If someone seems a bit strange, or is crying because their dog is dead or they just lost a close friend, security can detain them. People have told me they are very worried, that they didn’t feel safe riding the metro.”

But what is especially grating for Goulet and the people his organization serves, according to an open letter sent to the STM and Suicide-Action Montreal—the non-profit group that designed the campaign and provides training for metro security—and forwarded to the Mirror, is the carte-blanche invitation to not “wait until you are sure. There will not be any reprimands for worrying about someone else.” In these soothing assurances Goulet sees a convenient excuse to clean undesirables out of the subways. The letter charges the STM and Suicide-Action Montreal with being concerned only with ridding the metros of “people who are marginalized, bizarre or behave atypically” for the benefit of its more upscale users.

The need for sympathy

“That’s ridiculous,” says Brian Mishara, a psychology professor and director of the Centre de recherche et d’intervention sur le suicide et l’euthanasie (CRISE) at UQÀM. Mishara, who authored a 1996 report examining Montreal metro suicides, sat on the task force with STM personnel and Suicide-Action Montreal to examine the problem of subway suicides and thinks the intervention program is a success.

“People are almost always overwhelmingly grateful for help,” he says. “This is a very positive thing. Showing that we care is the type of message we want to transmit.”
His 1996 study reports that the vast majority of the 146 metro suicides between March 1986 and February 1996 had a history of mental health problems. Having anyone, either ordinary citizens or uniformed security agents, intervene can only be a good thing, he believes. “It provides an opportunity for these people to get some sort of help, to talk to someone, to see that someone cares about them being distressed.”

He defends acts of intervention by security guards by pointing out that they are trained to deal with these kinds of situations. “This is not a police action, it’s offering help to people who are distraught in a public space,” he says. He says that, over a four-year period, there have been almost 700 successful interventions with potentially suicidal people in Montreal subways, although he admits the levels of risk varied from case to case.

Brigitte Lavoie, Suicide-Action Montreal’s executive director, says she is disappointed Action Autonomie “really badly misunderstood” the purpose of the campaign. She thinks it will build on an already high success rate. “Last year, in approximately 200 interventions, there was a 100 per cent cooperation rate” from potential suicide victims, she says. “That proves that when someone is thinking about killing themselves, part of them wants to die, but a part also wants to live.”

She adds that in potential suicide cases, speed is of the essence, and picking up one of the red phones will both alert subway drivers and get security on the scene quickly. Alert commuters will help. “Obviously, having 300,000 pairs of eyes on the look-out is better than having only 2,000,” she says of the campaign.

STM spokesperson Odile Paradis says a full report on the campaign will be released by the end of April at the latest. :