If You're Going to San Francisco....

I'm glad I looked up "The Bridge" before we watched in class, for I was able to mentally prepare myself. Nonetheless, the film was not easy to watch and a recurrent thought in my mind concerned those who witnessed someone take their lives as it happened. What thoughts and emotions were they experiencing before and after it happened? According to the photographer, it was difficult to identify the situation as real, and he felt like a spectator lacking the ability to prevent the woman from jumping. This reminded me of the diffusion of responsibility, a theory in social psychology that attempts to explain why people sometimes fail to offer assistance even when it is obviously and desperately needed. For example, a woman under attack while on a crowded city street may not receive help because that responsibility has been diffused throughout all the pedestrians. Their anonymity allows them to merely ignore the situation because they cannot be singled out and blamed. Everyone assumes that someone else will lend a helping hand, but why does no one want to help in the first place? Are they too shy? Are they uncertain as to whether or not aid is needed? Do they think that their service would be unwanted or futile? Walking on the bridge, these very well could have been running through peoples' minds when presented with a person about to jump into the water. For most of the suicides, they were of a most ambiguous character, and I'm sure many failed to recognize them for what they truly were, which is understandable. Bystanders may also have thought that talking the person out of it would have been pointless, and that attempts at physical restraint would have just made things much worse. Finally, it's entirely possible that people were frozen with trying to comprehend a reality they may have never considered before. Despite the fact that suicide is no secret, very few have actually witnessed one before their own eyes, and therefore have given little thought to how they would behave if they did. When actually faced with these kinds of situations, people can be so mentally and emotionally unprepared that they simply have no idea how to react.