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The Golden Gate Bridge is seen Jan. 27, 2005 in San Francisco

But before she will share any information, she requires journalists to listen to a short lecture. It goes like this:

Don’t write about suicides from the bridge. If you do, it will cause more suicides — it is a scientific fact. Because of this, all other Bay Area media have made an agreement to not do stories about bridge suicides.

It's clear that Currie, who has personally witnessed people jumping to their deaths from the bridge, sincerely believes the deaths and media coverage are linked.

Is that true? And is there really a conspiracy of silence by Bay Area media when it comes to reporting the suicides?

As far as media silence is concerned, the answer turns out to be… yes, well, sort of.

However, when it comes to the idea that media coverage causes suicides, there are strong doubts — and statistics seem to undermine that claim.

In fact, despite nearly nonexistent news coverage so far in 2011, suicides from the bridge have increased this year and are on pace to possibly set a new annual record. The same thing is apparently happening with suicides on Caltrain tracks — and there has been little news reporting of those deaths too.

The troubling trend — and the reason some experts believe it’s happening — are the subject of my latest column.

It is a story that emerged over the course of three months after hearing anecdotes about an increase in bridge suicides, and seeing an alarming number of Caltrain fatality reports coming into The Bay Citizen newsroom. It took some persistence and legwork to find and determine this year’s number of suicides. Once that happened, and a comparison to deaths in past years was done, it became clear that we’re in the midst of a suicide surge. Then the story became a quest to find out why.

Little reporting is done on the bridge suicides, and news coverage of Caltrain suicides is limited too. It’s a situation that has evolved over decades for several reasons.

In his article “Jumpers,” published in The New Yorker in 2003, Tad Friend reported that Bay Area media outlets have a rather shameful and exploitative history when it comes to covering bridge suicides. Both the Examiner and Chronicle published countdowns in their newspapers when all-time suicide totals neared 500 in 1973 and 1,000 in 1995 — as if it were some sort of game. Unfortunately, some people played along. One man was found with “‘500’ chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt,” according to The New Yorker. (He was not actually No. 500).

And it got worse. As No. 1,000 approached, “A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim,” Friend wrote.

After this disgraceful episode, bridge authorities and public health officials asked the local media to cool it. Not only did the hype stop, but a kind of vow of silence also developed. Reporting on the suicides is now relatively rare.

Has it made a difference? Apparently not. Ken Holmes, the former Marin County coroner (the office that investigates most bridge suicides), told The New Yorker, “We weaned them,” referring to the media, but, “the lack of publicity hasn’t reduced the number of suicides at all.”

Since the bridge opened in 1937, the average number of suicides per year has been 19. But since 2000, after local media coverage was curtailed, the number has averaged 25. (And local news coverage is relevant: According to an analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle, 87 percent of jumpers are from the Bay Area.)

There have been, however, specific instances of media coverage that some experts believe contributed to suicides.

After the release of the documentary “The Bridge” in late 2006, which included graphic footage of people falling to their deaths, the number of bridge suicides went up. The movie has actually been seen by relatively few people — its total U.S. box office earnings to date are just $179,780 — but the disturbing images and controversy surrounding the film reignited the debate about building a suicide barrier, and that discussion received a burst of local news coverage.

In 2009, four teenagers from the same Palo Alto high school committed suicide by stepping onto the Caltrain tracks. The deaths happened over the course of weeks, and there was concern that media coverage contributed to a type of frenzy that somehow glamorized the suicides, causing other children to take their lives.

Both local and national news media covered those deaths, treading carefully in order not to hype or exploit the story.

But in the information age, the definition of “media” has changed. For example: teenagers, for the most part, do not subscribe to newspapers or watch the 6 p.m. TV news. They get the news that’s important to their lives from friends’ text messages, Twitter and Facebook, which operate without editorial supervision or the rigors of fact-based journalism.

This means that media silence — for those who believe it prevents suicide — is now virtually impossible to achieve.