SBB is dropping the use of the term Fremdereignis (EN: external event, FR: événements liés à une cause externe ) when someone jumps in front of a passing train.
Why? Passengers did not understood the “neutral” term and became more aggressive to SBB employees.
It seems that using the term Personenunfall ( EN: personal accident, FR: accident de personne) makes us a bit more understanding of why the train is late.
Article in German, and in French.
I don’t understand why they had to change it in the first place, it was perfectly fine as it was (and will be again).
I actually think they need to be more specific. A suicide attempt is a suicide attempt, everyone knows this and conveying the truth isn’t going to encourage more attempts.
Some sympathy should be shown for the train crews involved and for the poor souls who are tasked with the grisly process of cleaning up the mess.
Actually it does. There’s documented evidence to show this and there are now suicide hotspots on various rail routes.
These actually increase the number of suicides or attempted suicides.
I think this was one reason why the change to vagueness in reporting was adopted.
I guess SBB value a favourable public perception more than peoples’ lives.
The reasoning seems more to give some better consideration to the wellbeing of their personnel who are unnecessarily coming under fire from the public due to the vagueness of the delay, whilst balancing that with respect and dignity for the victim.
Places become notorious suicide spots largely due to the reporting in the media rather than the wording of station announcements.
The first measure is to avoid the suicides in the first place. Psychologists seem fairly united in the approach that talking about it (with vulnerable people being aware) instills a copycat effect. Suicide hotspots are one such consequence.
That’s why suicide, both as a topic and the individual cases, has been largely removed from the news or is intentionally vague. The same applies to bulimia/anorexia, and probably many other issues, self harm in general.
From May last year:
New announcement for suicides
SBB will soon no longer speak of “personal accidents”
Previously, suicide incidents were always referred to as “personal accidents” in announcements. However, due to the copycat effect, a new announcement is now being introduced.
Sorry, it’s only Blick but I can’t be bothered to find the actual source which I remembered reading last year.
So, “as reported in the media”.
The announcement was reported in the media.
Over and out.
This is reasonable. The news and topic have been “erased” from our lives. It is possible to minimize the news from someone using their own gun at home. Sad to say, but no one cares. For a municipality that has to deal with an event every decade, it’s no big deal and preventing copycats is a success.
On the good news side, the suicide rate in Switzerland has practically halved from year since year 2000 until 2024.
While the authorities in the places we live can help by pretending nothing happened…SBB can’t do the same. Much easier to hide something happening at a private home, than an event impacting the lives of thousands of people including the train driver who can only see and listen to while being unable to do anything.
Anyway, good news from rail transport stats: only 10 suicides in 2023. This is great, a transport disruption on any given day around Switzerland is quite probably not caused by a Personenunfall.
This is quite noticeable if you use a rail link which has had these incidents in the past. I recall the stretch I live on had perhaps 3 or 4 per year, sometimes less but I don’t remember the last time it happened. Must have been at least 18 months or 2 years ago?
I was on an SBB train 2 weeks ago (Munich > Zurich), About 100km from the border with Switzerland, (still in Germany) at about 22h30 - and already with a lot of delay, we stopped in the middle of nowhere, because of what was described by the loudspeaker as a “personenlunfall” (i.e. what looked like a suicide). Some 30 minutes later, more news… it was just an ‘unfall’ --without the ‘personen’. They counted legs, and there were 4… it had been a sheep, or a goat, or something like that. Yet, the zugfuhrer was traumatized (very understandably), and we had to wait another hour or more for a new train driver…
