There are not many viaducts these days. Not by that name, anyway. They are now called bridges, causeways, skyways or (wonderful British word) flyovers. The one I know best is the Prince Edward (alias Bloor Street) viaduct over the Don Valley in Toronto.

William Bothwell The anti-suicide barriers added to it in 2003 drive desperate people elsewhere when they want to leave a world they find intolerable. The PEV (acronym mine) was once the second most popular place for jumping to a conclusion, after the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. Despite the safety precautions the number of suicides in Toronto has not declined. There are more suicides than homicides in Canada each year.

Mark Sinyor of the Department of Psychiatry at the U of T, appeals for more programmes to educate the public about suicide prevention and to increase access to mental health facilities. Toronto Transit would like to provide greater safety at underground tracks. Each station’s upgrading would involve a cost of $10 million. The alternative, says Sinyor, would be a better general understanding of what impels people to take their own lives.

Statistics show that male artists and top executives are more prone to self-destruction under pressure. So are physicians. More women than men make the attempt but men are more likely to succeed. Persons of either sex who are under 35 are less successful than those 50 or over. Single people seem more likely to end it all prematurely than are married folk. Divorced men do so at a rate of 69.4 per 100,000. With divorced women that drops to 18.4.

There are several suicides mentioned in the Bible, from Samson to Judas. Neither Jewish nor Christian scripture actually forbids it as does the Qur’an which sees it as a more serious crime than murder. St Augustine, the 5th Century North African bishop and theologian, called it a detestable and damnable sin. Within recent memory the taking of one’s own life could mean the denial of a Christian burial but even in the conservative Roman Church it is now not unusual to consider that a burdened soul did not have sufficient freedom of will to be charged with committing a mortal sin.

In Asia, as in the pre-Christian West, self-administered death was acceptable as an act of honour or self-renunciation. Some will have read about the ‘harakiri’ practised by feudal Japanese samurai or remember its modern wartime version among suicide bombers. Jewish history honours the self-destruction of those who resisted the Roman siege of Masada. Brutus ran upon his sword held by his aide Strabo at Philippi, saying according to Shakespeare, “Caesar, now be still. I killed not thee with half so good a will”. Strabo reflects, “Brutus only overcame himself. No man else hath honour by his death”.

The first modern writing about suicide was done by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, in Le Suicide. He was not a psychiatrist and has been criticised for exploring only the social aspect of the problem rather than what motivates the individuals concerned.

Sigmund Freud, the proto-psychoanalyst, saw that suicide was akin to depression. It was, he said, a form of aggression against a loved one that turned inwardly upon oneself. Later he formulated the idea of ‘the death instinct’. Suicide was the triumph of the death wish over the ‘life instinct’, the will to live.

It is a form of aggression designed to punish or manipulate others. The conscious mind, said Freud, does not believe in its own death. The person who plans to take his/her own life does so over a long period of ‘failure of adaptation’. Suicide notes are meant to establish sorrow or guilt feelings in someone but the person committing the act seems not to realise that he/she will not be around to enjoy the result of their action.

Still, the ‘why’ of suicide is an elusive and complex matter for investigators. Poverty as such does not seem to drive people to take their own lives. More usually it is the wealthy who do so in the face of some failure. Nor does physical suffering seem to be a factor. The incidence among cancer sufferers is low. Most expire only after “a valiant fight”. Loneliness, surviving all of one’s most valued contemporaries, fear of disgrace, loss of a reason to live are lethal mindsets.

In our part of the world the fewest suicides happen in December even though Christmas can be a lonely time of year for some and its financial strain a problem for many. That may be because, as Horatio’s encomium of the season in Hamlet says, “so hallowed and so gracious is the time”.

T.S. Eliot may have been right in calling April, in The Wasteland, “the cruellest month”. April and May have been documented as a particularly suicidal time. Does depression increase as healthy persons are elated by springtime? Freud would emphasise sexual frustration when so many others’ “fancy lightly turns to thought of love”.

Albert Camus, the 20th Century philosopher, wrote, “I see people dying because they decide that life has not meaning. I also see people willing to die for ideals that, paradoxically, give them a reason to live. I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions”. Like many in the Hebrew and Christian religious traditions, Camus undoubtedly knew the words ascribed to Moses, “I have set before you death and life. Choose life”.

Often quoted are other words of Camus, “There is only one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide”. In other words, what are the things that make life worth living? It depends more on one’s mental and spiritual assets than on the much sought after physical endowments or a prestige address.

Most actions aimed at selfdestruction, whether or not they succeed, are attempts to reach out in some way to other people. In the Marie-Claire Blais novel Vivre, Vivre a character says, “One begins thinking of suicide as the last stage of one’s own inner revolt”. “As a man thinketh, so is he”. Or, so he ceases to be.