A subway staff member keeps watch at the Zhichunlu Station on the Subway Line 10 in Beijing, China, July 21, 2008. (Photo : Getty Images)
A Beijing subway station has established an intervention and counseling system for its employees in response to a recent string of people committing suicide on the tracks.
The intervention system includes teaching how to spot would-be jumpers, persuading them not to do it, implementing immediate rescue procedures, and offering psychological counseling to traumatized staff, a subway employee from Line 2's Qianmen station told the Global Times on Monday.
In March, the station invited psychological experts from Beijing's Huilongguan Hospital to train staff members on how to effectively intervene, to understand why people commit suicide, and how to deal with the psychological damage from such incidents.
Li Xianyun, a psychiatrist from Huilongguan Hospital, said the subway employees now have the ability to recognize suicidal passengers.
"Station staff approach passengers who wander around for a long time in the station and look desperate or depressed," said Li, adding that employees who witness suicides firsthand are encouraged to seek psychological help immediately.
The stations have assigned staff to monitor and manage foot traffic to ensure that people do not fall onto the tracks by accident, and have placed cameras at the entrance to the tunnels to monitor any suspicious behavior in real time, according to the Global Times.
The new measures follow a recent string of people committing suicide or accidentally falling on Beijing's subway tracks.
In June the previous year, a 30-year-old passenger was injured from falling onto the tracks after fainting from high blood pressure. Another passenger reportedly jumped and was killed by a train approaching the Wansholou subway station in March.
According to an official government report, 39 incidents of passengers falling onto the rails in Beijing's subway system were reported from Jan. 2014 to March 2016. Of the 39 passengers, 26 were said to have jumped on purpose, while four people fell from the subway platforms by accident.
21 of the incidents occurred on stations in the Line 1 and Line 2 of the Beijing subway, mainly on peak hours, the report said. These lines, the oldest in the city's subway system, are the only ones with stations that do not have shield doors between the platforms and the tracks.
Many of the Line 1 and Line 2 stations are over 20 years old and must be redesigned in order to accommodate the heavy shield doors, the Global Times said in its report.
An insider told the newspaper under the condition of anonymity that work to install shield doors on the two subway lines is ongoing and is expected to be completed by June this year.
