Off the Mississippi River Bridge

By the sophomore year of college, students had to declare a major, meaning that we chose a special field to study in depth. I selected psychology as a major, with English literature as a minor. I chose psychology because it had the fewest requirements and I was interested in how people think.

In a course on Abnormal Psychology, one day our professor described a memorable case he had dealt with. A depressed man had walked halfway across the long bridge that crosses the Mississippi River at Memphis. He had decided to commit suicide. He climbed over the protective railing and jumped. Falling so far and hitting the water would normally kill a person, but on the way down he decided he didn’t want to die.

After going deep underwater, he managed to return to the surface. As he drifted down the middle of the river, injured by the fall, he swam toward the Arkansas side. Two kilometers downstream, completely exhausted, he reached the bank of the river. He rested, then hobbled to a nearby road where someone picked him up and took him straight to a Memphis hospital.

After he received medical treatment, my professor was called to provide a mental evaluation of the man. I’ll never forgot that particular case.

Psychology has been a long-term help in trying to understand people of my native culture and my adopted culture. Sometimes we can understand why people do things; sometimes we don’t have a clue. But there is probably a reason for the choices people make, and it’s important to try to understand those reasons. And people do change, sometimes in a flash.

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