ninme

WaPo - Suicide jumps off city bridge upset witnesses

A bridge in Seattle is becoming hazardous to the mental health of the dot-com employees and other office workers below, who keep seeing people jump to their deaths from the span.

Thirty-nine people during the past decade have committed suicide off the 155-foot-high Aurora Bridge — eight last year alone — and counselors are regularly brought in to help office workers deal with the shock of seeing the leap or the bloody aftermath.

That bridge, that side of it specifically, is probably rather better known for the troll.

At least one woman, Sarah Edwards, drives on the left side of the street near her office ever since a body landed on the hood of a co-worker’s car. …

Some jumpers hit the water, others land on the pavement or solid ground. Either way, they almost always die. (One person is said to have survived after landing in the water.)

The neighborhood beneath the bridge used to be docks and warehouses, and the suicides went largely unnoticed. But during the technology boom of the past two decades, it morphed into a trendy area full of office buildings, shops and restaurants, and the bodies began to fall where people could see them.

I always knew people in this city were miserable. Look at their politics.

In my History of Japan class we went off on a tangent about the Japanese attitude to suicide (short version: it’s different than ours) and chuckled over the quaintly Japanese way they put signs reading “Stop! Think! You have something to live for!” and the like near popular jumping points.

A few weeks ago, officials installed six emergency phones and 18 signs that read, “Suicidal?” and give the number of a 24-hour crisis line in bold yellow type.

Uh huh.

Curtsy: Wheat & Weeds.

I think I prefer when area men are having lethal sex with horses or backyard-daylight-on-the-film-their-wives-are-recording-to-hand-to-police-sex with dogs. It’s a little less creepy.

I’ve seen references to this story here and there for the past couple days, but just thought it was some weird medical gene deficiency and the press interest was just the usual circus freak-show for Columbia School of Journalism grads. Then the Times used a proper title and I thought “who-wha?”

The Times - Parents defend decision to keep girl a child

Her name is Ashley X, and she is the little girl who will never grow up. Until New Year’s Day, not even her first name was known. Ashley was a faceless case study, cited in a paper by two doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital as they outlined a treatment so radical that it brought with it allegations of “eugenics”, of creating a 21st-century Frankenstein’s monster, of maiming a child for the sake of convenience.

The reason for the controversy is this: three years ago, when Ashley began to display early signs of puberty, her parents instructed doctors to remove her uterus, appendix and still-forming breasts, then treat her with high doses of oestrogen to stunt her growth.

In other words, Ashley was sterilised and frozen in time, for ever to remain a child. She was only 6.

Ashley, the daughter of two professionals in the Seattle area, never had much hope of a normal life.

Hey hey!

Afflicted with a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy, she cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed or even swallow food. Her parents argued that “keeping her small” was the best way to improve the quality of her life, not to make life more convenient for them.

Because of her small size, the parents say, Ashley will receive more care from people who will be able to carry her: “Ashley will be moved and taken on trips more frequently and will have more exposure to activities and social gatherings … instead of lying down in her bed staring at TV all day long.”

By remaining a child, they say, Ashley will have a better chance of avoiding everything from bed sores to pneumonia — and the removal of her uterus means that she will never have a menstrual cycle or risk developing uterine cancer.

Because Ashley was expected to have a large chest size, her parents say that removing her breast buds, including the milk glands (while keeping the nipples intact), will save her further discomfort while avoiding fibrocystic growth and breast cancer.

They also feared that large breasts could put Ashley at risk of sexual assault.

Mmph.

The case was approved by the hospital’s ethics committee in 2004, which agreed that because Ashley could never reproduce voluntarily she was not being subjected to forced sterilisation, a form of racial cleansing promoted in the 1920s and known as eugenics (it was satirised in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby [it was?]). However, the case of Ashley X was not made public, and, as a result, no legal challenges were ever made.

Uhhh…