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. Expert Skydiver and former 22 SAS Soldier Charles (Nish) Bruce QGM committed suicide following 8 years of mental illness and periods under section by leaping from a Cessna 172 from 5000 feet over Fyfield, Oxfordshire without a parachute whilst on a private flight home from Spain to Hinton Skydiving Centre. His military history and the manner of his death resulted in extensive media coverage. Numerous sources have looked to attribute his breakdown and suicide to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Read more about this topic: Tentative Wound
Famous quotes containing the words jumping and/or height:
“Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand. Those flying fish, they’re not leaping for joy, they’re jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There’s no beauty here, only death and decay.”
—Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)