Tourists Keep Jumping Off Our Buildings
New York is depressing again! After years of relative safety and fun (and occasional terror), tourists across the nation are now flocking to New York City to entwine themselves forever with oblivion. According to the Daily News, more than 10% of New York's suicides are committed by out-of-towners— 407 of them from 1990-2004.
Our buildings are tall and we have a large number of bridges, so it's natural that "jumping from a height is more common in New York than in the rest of the United States," as a report from the New York Academy of Medicine says.
In the rest of the country, people tend to do kill themselves in the privacy of their own homes, but as usual, New York attracts the attention-seeking and the egotistical, and then crushes their narcissistic dreams by forcing them to confront the oppressive anonymity of their own insignificance. Or something. That helpful and macabre graphic from the News explains it much better.
Some 'tourists' choose city landmarks for suicide [NYDN]