Kevin Briggs: ...on how to help those who are suicidal

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sergeant Kevin Briggs is a retired California Highway Patrol officer who spent many years patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. While on patrol, he encountered numerous individuals clinging to life by a thread – individuals who had lost hope and could see no way out of their current situation - ready to jump off the bridge to what they assumed was a sudden death and ending of their pain and hopelessness. His TED talk entitled, "The bridge between life and death", has had millions of views. He is the author of the book, "Guardian of the Gate".

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Jan Black.
0:11.4	And I'm Laura Owens.
0:13.0	And joining us on the line right now is Kevin Briggs, long-time California Highway Patrol
0:17.6	Sergeant, who's beat centered around the Golden Gate Bridge.
0:21.2	He's now retired, and the author of a book about his experience is helping people he encountered on the bridge who were contemplating suicide.
0:28.7	Over the course of some two decades, he talked with more than 200 people who had come to the Golden Gate Bridge to end their lives.
0:36.2	He saved all but two of those people. His book is called Guardian of the Golden Gate Bridge to end their lives. He saved all but two of those people.
0:38.6	His book is called Guardian of the Golden Gate, protecting the line between hope and despair.
0:44.9	Your story is a really fascinating one.
0:47.4	Talk to us a little bit about how you ended up being the go-to person so often over the years
0:52.8	when it came to responding to suicidal people on the
0:56.0	bridge?
0:57.6	Sure.
0:58.4	Actually, I started working on the bridge.
1:02.2	Way back probably 1994-ish, and I actually just liked the beat.
1:07.3	I didn't know that it had so many suicides and suicide attempts on the bridge.
1:12.6	So this was very new to me. I had no training in this. And it hit me really hard when I had to come up to
1:19.3	one of these incidents. So I decided to know if I want to work down here, I better educate myself.
1:26.6	So I started going to the library.
1:29.3	We didn't have the computer back then and doing a lot of research and finding out how I could become better at talking to folks.
1:35.3	What were they thinking possibly? What's going through their head?
1:39.3	So that's kind of how I got started into this.
	...

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