The project began after years of advocacy by families and friends of people who had jumped off the bridge and died after hitting the water nearly 245 feet below. The suicide net has been under construction since 2018 and is set for completion in November 2023 after multiple delays. But of course, we train for it like it could occur at any time.” “The amount of folks we anticipate bringing out of the net is relatively small. “History has shown in other areas such as Ithaca, New York, that it actually does work,” Welch said, referring to nets installed at Cornell University bridges in 2013 in response to suicides. What is beyond my ability, I just give up to the gods.Tom Welch, the district’s deputy chief of training and operations, said he expects the presence of the massive net and the 20-foot drop to deter most people from jumping. I just want to bring light to those who are in the dark,” he said. It was time that I borrowed from my wife and my child,” he said, adding that his wife had taken the brunt of childcare.Ĭhen says he will only stop when he no longer has the strength to haul people down from the edge.
But the father of one says voluntary work has come at a cost to his personal life. He now has other volunteers to help him, including psychology students from local universities, and trains them in the urgent task of talking to people on the bridge.īased in a small office, with the motto “cry when you need to cry” painted on the wall, Chen converted two rooms into dorms for desperate people without a place to sleep. But from Chen’s perspective, that decline is yet to translate into fewer people on the Nanjing bridge. Official statistics show China’s suicide rate dropping to 5.29 per 100,000 people from 13.56 per 100,000 in 2000 – around half the rate in the United States. Mental health advocates say there is a desperate shortage of qualified professionals equipped to deal with the surge of people experiencing psychological problems, while social stigma around mental health can add to the burden. It suggested rapid social change could be to blame, spurring psychological pressure and stress. Mental health problems have become more common across China in recent decades, according to a study published in medical journal The Lancet two years ago. Volunteer Chen Si has patrolled the Nanjing bridge for the past 18 years in the hope of preventing people from jumping. Those figures are probably incomplete because traces of some people are never found. “So we don’t keep count any more but we know it is more than 3,000 lives lost.”
“Sometimes when we inspect the bridge in the morning, we find a single high-heel shoe, or a phone with a note under it,” Zhang Chun, director of a civil society group in the city, said. It won a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the longest dual highway and railway bridge.īut now it is record-setting for a darker reason: it is believed to be the location of the most suicides in the world, having overtaken the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco some years ago. When it was completed in 1968, the double-decker Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge was celebrated as a feat of Chinese engineering. “In the past, I didn’t have the ability to protect myself, and the people I wasn’t able to save returned to haunt my dreams.” Now, when someone jumps, he turns away. His duties on the bridge weigh heavily on Chen and he visits temples to unburden himself. “It built the basis for me to understand people.” “Although the books had lost some pages, I kept reading them,” he said. A pile of tattered Freud books bought from a street vendor years ago also kindled an interest in psychology. Growing up in poverty in rural Jiangsu province helped Chen understand people’s desperation, describing himself as “a farmer from the village a foothold in the city”. “I tell them that I’m also a very ordinary person,” Chen said.
He says he has since helped 412 people step back from the brink on the bridge – roughly one every fortnight.Īmong them was a young man who was particularly strong and bit through his tongue as several men dragged him from the bridge’s edge, while another was a man who owed millions of yuan. Photo: AFPĪfter he stopped to talk, the woman climbed down and Chen realised he may inadvertently have saved a life. The 3km Nanjing bridge has gained a macabre reputation, but Chen has devoted himself to helping those he meets there.
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