This follows over 1400 suicides since the bridge's opening in 1937: a morbid record 46 were in 2013 alone, possibly exacerbated by the global economic crisis. The barrier is in place to prevent the end-point of suicidal behaviour (physically preventing suicide) but how much effort is going into the examination of the external factors that drive such behaviour? Aleman & Denys1 argue that psychiatry has failed to tackle suicide as a disease entity in its own right, instead relegating the act of deliberately ending one's life to a symptom or consequence of an underlying psychiatric illness. They note that in DSM-5 suicidality is only mentioned as a symptom of borderline personality disorder and mood disorders, despite this presenting as the most prominent psychiatric emergency.
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