In this article:
About the sixth paragraph down, with no cite, Germans kill themselves at the rate of 18 per week by train. In the next paragraph, The US CDC says that 112 people in the US in 2002 used buses, trains and subways to do themselves in. So…
That means that Germans used that form of suicide at rate almost 9 times greater than in the US, although the guys running the trains alledge the rate is far higher.
This just doesn’t seem right. Any one have any idea what the real story is?
It’s a lot tougher to get guns and perhaps the right drugs to do oneself in there. Although one would think a good, stout piece of rope would do the trick. But aren’t self-inflicted gun wounds the number one suicide method in the USA?
Every now and again in Frankfurt you’d hear that the S-Bahn was down because of a suicide, but that rate seems a bit high.
I’d certainly like to know where they got their - my suspicion is that it’s 18 attempted suicides a week. There’s 35 suicides each day in Germany, so 18 a week by train would be a sixth of the total.
The figure for Britain, with a similar population to Germany (and a similar accessable train network!) is 87 in twelve months across 2003-4, plus 50 on the London Underground.
Of course, there’s the problem that each country defines suicide differently - some on a commonsense assessment, while others (such as the UK) apply the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ burden of proof.
6% of the total.
:smack:
I did not find a statistic of German suicide methods quoting suicide-by-train on the Web, but 6 % of the total does not sound too implausible to me. The only rates that I found were
total (cite (German))
hanging - men 57 %/women 39 %
poison - men 11 %/women 23 %
other - men 32 %/women 38 %
children and youths (cite (German))
hanging - 24 %
shooting - 24 %
poison - 12 %
other - 28 %
Anecdotal information:
If the rate in Germany is 9 times that in the US (as the OP estimates) this may be due simply to more trains running, and a lot more of fast trains (I’d expect a suicide to prefer a short period of anticipation).
I’d have thought that the vast majority of ‘matter’ that ends up in the undercarriage is non-human (i.e. rats, birds, anything else that lives on railway embankments).
‘Due to passenger action’ is the British euphemism. But one jumper (or suspected jumper) could bring hundreds of trains to an emergency stop, if it’s necessary to throw all signals to red until the situation is fully understood by the signal controllers.
Scaling the OP’s figures for the different total populations, it’s supposedly about 30 times more common in Germany.
There’s a joke in here somewhere about the trains running on time…
I’ve seen a similar number for Japan. I don’t have cites either, but delays due to “injury” is extremely common. I think the main difference is that in Germany/Japan, trains are a more intimate part of people’s lives. There are level crossings everywhere, and most people take commuter trains on a regular basis. Commiting suicide is as simple as stepping off the platform just as the train is pulling into the station. Or taking a few extra steps when waiting at a level crossing.
Incidentally, the rumor in Japan is that if you commit suicide jumping in front of a train, the rail company will demand compensation from your family for causing delays. On the order of $100,000 is what I heard. I don’t know what the reality is.
Exactly. I just checked for the US, and 60% of all suicide deaths are from guns:
http://www.nami.org/Content/ContentGroups/E-News/20023/March_20022/Suicide_in_the_United____States.htm
Note in your post for the total poulations guns weren’t in the top 2 methods of suicide. I’m guessing guns are far less accessible in Germany than in the US. People who want to commit suicide with a clue logically would want a method that was very certain and very quick. Jumping in front of a train is an very good suicide method. Very likely to be successful, and if done right you won’t be alive long enough to suffer.
Main problem with suicide by train is that most suicides don’t want to travel far to off themselves. In the US except for a few urban areas there is hardly any passenger trains. Thus most people in urban areas won’t have nearby access to train tracks. If in Germany there are lots of urban transit is by train, that would mean nearby tracks would be common.
This is very true - from my previous link regarding the London Underground: “'Some underground stations have got higher suicide rates than others and although the reasons for this are not always obvious, knowing where they are gives a starting point for any changes.”
My guess is the main reasons why some stations have a higher suicide rate is:
#1) They are in the areas with the highest population density. Thus more suicidal people nearby.
#2) Demographics of the area. For example, suicide tends to be much more common amongst younger people. (One main reason for this is people prone to depression likely will have killed themselves off before Middle Age.) A station in an area which has an above average demographic skew towards older residents would be expected to have fewer suicides.
And for the person who commented “my suspicion is that it’s 18 attempted suicides a week.” From that London Underground link:
“I had to check under the train. Sometimes the person can still be alive. It was a young guy. He looked in his early teens but he was 25.”
The failure rate for attempting suicide by train tends to be quite low. Even if we conservatively assume that one third of all Germans who attempt suicide by train survive the effort, that would still be 12 successful suicides a week. Thus either suicide by train is far more common in Germany, or the UK is grossly underreporting suicides by train. If the standard in the UK is the “‘beyond reasonable doubt’ burden of proof”, and in Germany they presume a death by being hit by a train is a suicide absent good evidence to the contrary (such as a witness saying the person appeared to accidentally slip and fall on the tracks when the train is coming), then officially the UK will report a FAR lower number of suicides by train.
Sorry if this is too much of a personal anecdote, but here goes. I was travelling by train in Germany about 5 years ago and we did have a man commit suicide by jumping in front of our train. We had to wait for another train (and for the mess to get cleaned up enough for us to cross the tracks and get on the other train, since we were between stations; though I was told that they did find other, er, leg parts later on). It was all very routine and calm. We were on a school trip, and only found out later from our teacher what happened.
rfgdxm writes:
> For example, suicide tends to be much more common amongst younger people.
Suicide is most common among old people. People in their late teens and early twenties are the next most common group.
Good point. Although since a substantial percentage of suicides amongst the old are due to ill health, I’d wonder if elderly tend to be a substantial percentage of those who kill themselves by jumping in front of trains?