At noon on Dec. 12 last year, Herb James's son leaped off the Pattullo Bridge into the Fraser River.

Initially, he survived the fall. A tug close by picked him up. He was rushed to Royal Columbian Hospital where, his father said, they worked for seven hours to save him. They failed.

His son, 44, left behind a wife, three children and his parents. He had worked as a claims adjuster, work he enjoyed. Earlier in the year, his father said, he had suffered from depression and had been hospitalized for almost two months. After his release, his father said, his son had assured him he had not contemplated taking his own life.

His suicide was not reported in the news. Suicides rarely are. Unless a celebrity is involved, or the circumstances surrounding the suicide are extraordinary, they are considered "not news" -- a journalistic tradition that likely sprang from suicide's stigma.

It was, after all, for many years a crime. There was also the idea that it somehow reflected on the family, one reason why many suicides went unreported or, in obituaries, were clad in euphemism. With that in mind, newspapers felt it cruel to subject surviving family members to the shame associated with it. There was also the concern of a copycat effect. There was some anecdotal evidence that suicides increased as discussion of them did, and the media did not want to give anyone any ideas.

Herb James felt no such shame. His son had been brought up in a happy home, he said. He and his wife had been good to him. But he did feel a lingering pain, he said, a bewildering trauma that he compared to a rape or war crime.

The Jameses joined a group counselling session to help them come to terms with their son's death. It was, he said, a godsend. Only "those of us left behind," he said, were admitted to the group. They at least had a common pain only those in the group could understand.

But going through the process, James started to research just what was out there for people like him.

"I was absolutely shocked at the lack of resources," he said.

He also discovered how difficult it was to find information on suicide.

He did find the usual statistics, and plenty of them: There are about 500 reported suicides in B.C. annually, while there are between 3,600 and 4,000 reported suicides in Canada each year -- now outstripping traffic-accident deaths, and far surpassing the number of murders. Suicide rates have been rising sharply over the last five decades. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for youth and young adults in B.C. and Canada. Between 75 and 80 per cent of all suicides are men. Only 10 per cent of all suicide attempts are successful. According to one B.C. study, seven per cent of 15,000 secondary students interviewed had attempted suicide. A suicide leaves, on average, a half-dozen family members behind.

But James wanted more than that. His son had jumped from a bridge, and he wanted to know the number of suicides attempted from bridges and from other government-controlled facilities -- not just from all of the Lower Mainland's major bridges, but on highways, on SkyTrain and university campuses.

He got nowhere.

"I can't get any response from bridge people, the government, the universities -- no one will give me any stats. I believe there's something out there that [they] don't want publicized -- it could be they're worried about copycat suicides."

He had met a man socially, he said, whose company had the contract for cleaning up suicides committed on SkyTrain tracks, and that man told him there were between three and six suicides a month -- an anecdotal number SkyTrain authorities refused to discuss.

James's interest went beyond numbers. In other jurisdictions -- Britain and Hong Kong, he said -- new subway stations were being built with barriers between the track and landing platforms. And in some U.S. cities -- in San Francisco, for example, where the Golden Gate Bridge is the most popular "suicide magnet" in the world -- there has been discussion about suicide barriers along railings or nets below a bridge deck.

Why not, James reasoned, think about such things here? So in the interest of bringing the discussion out into the open so lives might be saved, he started a website, www.suicidestats.org. It is a simple, one-page site, but it offers links and advice.

Similar to James's site, but more established is www.teensuicideprevention.org, started by Dunbar resident Jude Platzer, who lost her 15-year-old son, Josh, to suicide in 1999. The Platzers have established a memorial fund for scholarships, a non-profit society and resource links. You'll soon see posters of theirs at bus stops promoting World Suicide Prevention Day, on Sept. 10.

The James's and the Platzers' sites are parts of a blossoming of such sites on the Internet, and their aim, as it says on Platzers' site, is "to reduce the stigma associated with suicide." Cancer, Platzer said, once had that stigma; it does not any longer.

"We have to start talking about it," James said.

As he has, here.

pmcmartin@png.canwest.com or 604-605-2905

© The Vancouver Sun 2007