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:
“We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)