VICTOR SCHMITT-BUSH
Special to the Leader
“He is ancient, yet ageless. He is ticking, yet timeless. He runs not hunted, he chases. He is a man of many faces. He is the darkness. I am the light.”
“That was a limerick I wrote in eighth grade about the immense duality I felt inside years prior to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder type one with psychotic features,” said Kevin Hines. His words were biting and abundant with urgency. The audience was silent, but in-between his words the impact of his story began to reverberate.
On Sept. 21 in the Williams Center, Hines, a suicide survivor, told his story. It was a heavy, emotional morning. Tears spread all across the room and friends and family held each other tightly.
According to Heather C. Brown, the assistant executive director at the Resource Center in Chautauqua County, Hines “attempted to take his life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He was one of only 34 to survive the fall, and is the only Golden Gate jump survivor ever who is actively spreading the message of living mentally healthy, internationally.”
Seventeen years after his jump, Hines assured the crowd that he is truly grateful for the second chance he’s had at life.
“I wish I knew back then what I know now. I wish I knew that my thoughts of suicide didn’t have to become my actions,” said Hines.
He pointed out, however, that the fruit of his plight was instigated by the defectiveness of his own brain. He still suffers from bipolar disorder, a mental disease he inherited from his birth parents.
He explained, “My biological parents had the co-occurring diseases of manic depression, today bipolar disorder, and the serious disease of addiction.”
Hines was only 9 months old when he was taken from his biological parents and later adopted by Pat and Debbie Hines.
His adopted father Pat, according to Hines, “is by all accounts a pragmatic, pessimistic and stone-faced man,” whereas his adopted mother Debbie, “is a consummate optimist. Her glass was never half empty, or half full,” Hines paused for a moment and continued, his words trembling yet still powerful, “It was always toppling over.”
With the support of his new family, Hines would live a relatively normal teenage life. It wasn’t until he turned 17 when his previously dormant psychological condition would break through to the surface of his waking life.
“I didn’t believe that I had the disease,” Hines said, “I didn’t want it. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to have the label of bipolar.”
He gritted his teeth and said, “I wanted to be the kid who just came off a WCAL championship win in wrestling. I wanted to be the kid whose football team went to state. I wanted to be the kid who was on the speech and debate team.”
Hines stammered. He took a deep breath and looked grievously to his right. As he turned his head back to the audience, he said “but that kid disappeared. That kid was falling apart at the seams. That kid was dying.”
Hines’ downhill slope was marked not only by his mental illness; his paranoia and mood swings began to amplify shortly after his adopted parents separated. As the psychosis took over, he was ravaged by lethargy, insomnia and hallucinations.
He would move in with Pat in Jan. 2000 after a ferocious dispute with his adopted mother Debbie. In that same month, one of his greatest heros, his drama teacher John Finnell, committed suicide.
Hines clenched his fists, bit his lip and said, “I had started to hear in my head auditory hallucinations; command hallucinations; a man’s voice in my head that I didn’t recognize as anybody I ever knew telling me what I had to do; telling me eventually that I had to die using these two hands.”
His downhill slope, according to Hines, quickly plummetted into insanity and sheer depression.
“‘I don’t want to be here anymore,’ I remember saying to my father. He said back to me, ‘You have an obligation to be here. We love you.’ [I] was on that day, the day I wrote that letter.’’
He wrote to a total of seven people. Most of them were to his family, but he remembers one note above all others.
“I said to my best friend Jake Lewis the worst part of the entire note. I said, ‘Jake, you’ll find another best friend,’ as if that’s how it works.”
On Sept. 24, 2000, Kevin Hines jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.
But according to Hines, “that is not the important part of this presentation, unlike most people believe. The important part came next,” he said. “Upon the millisecond of free fall, upon the millisecond that my hands left that rail, instant regret from my actions and the absolute recognition that I just made the greatest mistake of my life, and it was too late.”
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), “suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., and each year, 44,193 Americans die by suicide.”
According to Hines, “For over 2,000 people who jumped off of that bridge in 80 years, it was too late. Ninety-nine percent of suicides attempted at the Golden Gate are gone. 34 individuals now today have survived that fall. I would be number 26, falling 220 feet, 25 stories at 75 miles per hour.”
Only one thing is certain: as the suicide rate in America increases year by year, according to the AFSP, one must take into consideration the sheer importance of human connection, our communal imperative, the necessity for love and companionship.
“I sure believe,” said Hines “that if we are not anything else, we are one thing here on this earth. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We aren’t here for our own betterment or gain. We’re here to give back to those we know, those we love, those we care about, those we don’t know and, you bet, those we don’t even like.”
Hines and his father have taken immense strides in their effort to give back to their community.
In 2006, Hines assisted in the development of the movie, “The Bridge,” about the deaths at the Golden Gate. Later that year, his father co-founded the Bridge Rail Foundation, whose sole purpose was to raise a net around that bridge to prevent anymore deaths.
“As of January 2021,” Hines said proudly, “because we broke ground in July, not one more beautiful human being will die off the Golden Gate bridge; the net is being put in place right now.”