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Subject: Suicides and Blue LEDs
According to JapanToday there are plans to install blue overhead lights in train stations in the (IMO vain) hopes of discouraging suicides.
What's more interesting than this silly plan is the statistics given in the article:
34,427 suicides in 2003 is the current record. This year could surpass that.
2,000 people committed suicide by train last year, 6% of the 2008 total.
15,000,000 Yen ($167,000 USD) is the cost for adding these blue lights in East JR stations.
68 suicides on East JR lines for the 12 months ending in March.
That two thousand people bi- or tri-sect themselves with trains every year in Japan seems like a lot. I really didn't hear about any/many when I was in Japan. I think they keep that sort of thing out of the news to minimize the copycat risk.
Death by train seems spectacularly painful to me.
Quote by The Article:There’s no scientific proof that the lights actually reduce suicides, and some experts are skeptical it will have any effect. But others say blue does have a calming effect on people.
“We associate the color with the sky and the sea,” Mizuki Takahashi, a therapist at the Japan Institute of Color Psychology, a private research center that was not involved in the lighting project. “It has a calming effect on agitated people, or people obsessed with one particular thing, which in this case is committing suicide.”
What's more interesting than this silly plan is the statistics given in the article:
34,427 suicides in 2003 is the current record. This year could surpass that.
2,000 people committed suicide by train last year, 6% of the 2008 total.
15,000,000 Yen ($167,000 USD) is the cost for adding these blue lights in East JR stations.
68 suicides on East JR lines for the 12 months ending in March.
That two thousand people bi- or tri-sect themselves with trains every year in Japan seems like a lot. I really didn't hear about any/many when I was in Japan. I think they keep that sort of thing out of the news to minimize the copycat risk.
Death by train seems spectacularly painful to me.
BLEARGH