The families of students who die by suicide often seek to hold colleges responsible. Lawsuits typically claim that an institution failed to pick up on warning signs or to adequately protect a student whom campus officials knew to be suicidal. Far less often does a legal action cite, say, the absence of fences on a bridge.
But a lawsuit now pending against Cornell University in federal court takes that approach: It argues that the institution didn’t do enough to restrict access to a particular means of suicide. Specifically, Howard I. Ginsburg alleges that Cornell was negligent for not having installed barriers on the campus bridge where, in February 2010, his son, Bradley, jumped to his death. A judge this month rejected the university’s effort to have the suit dismissed, ruling that the case could continue.
Limiting access to certain methods of suicide, a strategy known as means restriction, has been gaining traction among mental-health researchers. Some suicides can be prevented, the logic goes, if it’s more challenging for an impulsive individual to harm himself.
But on most campuses, that strategy has not taken hold. Instead, counseling and education tend to be the centerpiece of suicide-prevention efforts. Only at a few institutions, mainly where students’ suicides have made headlines in recent years—like Cornell, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—have administrators acted, beyond locking doors to roofs, to significantly alter physical elements of the campus in the name of prevention.
In Mr. Ginsburg’s case against Cornell, counseling is not a central issue: Both sides agree that Bradley had displayed no outward signs that he was depressed. According to court documents, he had been getting good grades, was socially well adjusted, and kept in touch regularly with his parents. Still, Mr. Ginsburg argues that the university had covered up previous suicides there, and that it didn’t have adequate counseling available.
But the bridge over the Fall Creek Gorge in Ithaca, N.Y., is the crux of the case.
For not taking steps to block bridge suicides, the lawsuit says, both Cornell and the city were “negligent, careless, and reckless in failing to provide for safety and protection for vulnerable or impulsive individuals.” University and city officials, Mr. Ginsburg argues, knew that area bridges were a recurring site of suicides and therefore had an obligation to restrict access to them.
Cornell says it is “vigorously” fighting the suit, which Mr. Ginsburg filed in November.
The university already put up fences on its bridges, in March 2010, and plans to install nets underneath them. Campus officials argue that even though they are now deploying means restriction, they were under no legal obligation to do so.
In a written statement, Susan H. Murphy, vice president for student and academic services, warned that if the judge in the case finds Cornell liable, it “would mark a dramatic expansion of the law.” That would result in “monumental expenses” for landowners, she said, to retrofit their property with means-restriction measures.
A Successful Strategy
Limiting access to common means of suicide has proven, under some circumstances, successful. In the past few decades, mental-health experts have come to consider “means restriction” an important prevention strategy.
The leading method of suicide in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, for instance, was carbon-monoxide poisoning from coal-burning stoves. When households began to switch to natural-gas stoves, there was a drop in carbon-monoxide-related deaths—without a large compensatory rise in the rate of suicide by other means—and an overall decrease in suicides in some populations. That phenomenon, observed by the psychiatrist Norman Kreitman in 1976, sparked subsequent research by physicians on means restriction.
Over time, several observations and studies have supported restricting the means of suicide as a prevention strategy. In the United States, where the leading method of suicide is by gun, there is strong evidence that access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide, and that restricting such access can prevent deaths. At least a dozen studies have found that individuals who die by suicide are more likely to live in a home with a gun, according to a campaign called Means Matter, a project at the Harvard School of Public Health to publicize research showing that restriction is an effective way to curb suicides.
Limiting access to firearms does not seem to result in an uptick in suicides by other means, says Matthew J. Miller, a deputy director of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center, which runs the Means Matter campaign. But because deaths by jumping off bridges or buildings occur less frequently than other suicides do, the evidence in favor of means restriction for those methods is less complete, and the lack of a displacement effect is less clear, he says. So demonstrating the success of bridge barriers can be a challenge.
“The question for whether means restriction works isn’t ‘Do people stop jumping?’” says Dr. Miller. Rather, the strategy aims to prevent deaths by making them more difficult. He compares means-restriction measures to the use of air bags in motor vehicles.
Despite evidence that means restriction works, the strategy is still not widely employed, he says. “The conceptual shift to means restriction hasn’t taken place yet. It hasn’t penetrated into the consciousness of many people,” even medical professionals outside the field of suicide prevention.
And it is politically challenging to try to persuade policy makers of the need to restrict access to guns, says Dr. Miller, who is troubled by recent attempts in some states to loosen limits on guns on college campuses.
After years of pressure from suicide-prevention experts, officials in California have said they are moving ahead, in spite of the cost, with plans to install nets under the Golden Gate Bridge. It can be especially important to restrict access to jumping sites, Dr. Miller and other experts argue, because of the attention they attract. That can spark a contagion effect, prompting additional suicides.
An Impulsive Act
Means restriction doesn’t appear to have caught on in higher education as well. According to a recent national survey of counseling-center directors, about 16 percent of students who seek help do so for suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Prevention protocols, the survey found, were based almost exclusively on therapy or educational programs. No national or regional data track means restriction in particular, but anecdotally, those efforts seem rare on college campuses.
Some institutions lock doors to the roofs of campus buildings, but the concept of means restriction is not widely discussed, says Dan L. Jones, president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors and director of counseling at Appalachian State University. Colleges tend to be more reactive than proactive in that area, he says.
“Unfortunately, sometimes there has to be some horrid event before people take action on it,” Mr. Jones says.
A cost-benefit analysis may be one factor in the choice of many colleges not to pursue means restriction, says Victor I. Schwartz, medical director at the Jed Foundation, which works to prevent suicide among college students. Institutions may consider their limited resources and decide that money is better spent on mental-health education and outreach programs. Another factor, he says, is the popular yet mistaken notion that a student who is determined to die by suicide will do so in spite of any means restriction.
In fact, suicide, especially in college populations, is often an impulsive act, says Dr. Schwartz. “Given the improved science in this area, we know empirically that restriction does make a difference,” he says. “Some small group of people will use another means. For the rest, it can be lifesaving.”
At Cornell, Bradley Ginsburg’s death in 2010 was one of a string of suicides that academic year—and the first of three by jumping in a one-month span—that drove the campus into crisis mode. The university temporarily posted guards on the bridges and soon lined them with fencing—chain-link topped with wire, later replaced with black metal fences that are somewhat more attractive.
It also began a campus- and community-wide campaign for means restriction on the bridges to prevent further suicides, an idea considered, but not adopted, in the late 1970s and early 80s. Then, too, the university faced pushback from some students and local residents, who argued that bridge barriers were a blight on the natural landscape and worried that they would be a constant reminder of tragedy.
Despite opposition, the university worked with the city of Ithaca on a compromise. Last December the city approved a plan to replace the fences with permanent nets alongside and underneath the bridges. Cornell officials hope to have the nets in place by the time students return to campus this fall.
“The use of netting as a form of means restriction on bridges is cutting-edge technology,” Ms. Murphy, Cornell’s vice president, said in a written statement. “It has only recently been recognized as a viable approach, and it is extremely expensive.”
While Cornell’s recent work on means restriction has been praised by suicide-prevention experts, it is still defending itself against the Ginsburg family’s lawsuit, which argues that such efforts should have started sooner. Mr. Ginsburg essentially claims that the efforts were too little, too late for his son.
Another university that has experienced public suicides has adopted some form of means restriction. In 2003, after two students at NYU jumped from balconies at a library, the university installed glass barriers, which it has left in place. Campus officials confirmed the existence of the barriers but declined to discuss them.
MIT has altered some dorm windows in response to students’ deaths, a spokeswoman for the university confirmed, declining to discuss the issue further.
Legal Issues
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, the Cornell case brings attention to the prospect of means restriction on college campuses.
Little if any legal precedent suggests that a university could be held liable for failing to install suicide barriers on bridges, says Gary M. Pavela, a consultant in higher-education law. Still, he says, the negligence claim is significant: “There’s a strong policy argument that barriers work and make a difference.”
Lawsuits filed by the families of students who have died by suicide are typically settled out of court, without creating legal precedents. However, they can spur similar claims of liability from other plaintiffs’ lawyers. Given the strengthening policy argument for means restriction, Mr. Pavela predicts that such lawsuits will become more common.
And that, he says, will increase the chance that a court will find for a family, or that a state will make means restriction a legal duty for colleges.
In the face of such a requirement, campus officials might devote disproportionate resources to “putting bars on every window of every floor,” at the expense of other suicide-prevention strategies, Mr. Pavela says. Means restriction is a good idea, he says, but it may be a detrimental obligation.
In the meantime, absent that duty, individual colleges will have to weigh the relative importance of an emerging strategy for preventing suicide.
The reporter is an alumnus of Cornell University.
