Jumping From Height
Jumping from height is the act of jumping from high altitudes, for example, from a window (self-defenestration or auto-defenestration), balcony or roof of a high rise building, cliff, dam or bridge. This method, in most cases, results in severe consequences if the attempt fails, such as paralysis, organ damage, and bone fractures.
In the United States, jumping is among the least common methods of committing suicide (less than 2% of all reported suicides in the United States for 2005).
In Hong Kong, jumping is the most common method of committing suicide, accounting for 52.1% of all reported suicide cases in 2006 and similar rates for the years prior to that. The Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong believes that it may be due to the abundance of easily accessible high rise buildings in Hong Kong.
There have been several documented cases of suicide by skydiving, by people who deliberately failed to open their parachute (or removed it during freefall) and were found to have left suicide notes.
Read more about this topic: Suicide Methods
Famous quotes containing the words jumping and/or height:
“O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall—”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man’s will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterred by such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)