THE FORGOTTEN CASUALTY OF A RAILWAY SUICIDE.

In Germany, close to eight hundred people end their lives on the tracks.

Stephan Kniest is sitting at a table by the window. A boyish-looking 36, he is wearing a contemporary goatee and rimless glasses; his short hair is spiked with gel.

In front of him on the table is a Canon 5D with a huge lens, and next to it is a plastic bowl with the "Frikandel speciaal," a grilled meat roll with chopped onions, fries and ketchup. On the wall behind him hangs a photo that he took himself - a tanker, photographed diagonally from the front, an immense black hull in the twilight.

He finds peace by the sea, Kniest says. This is where he is able to shed the burden of work, the burden of the past few years. He can "drown the stress in the sea," he says, referring to his memories of what he calls "events."

His first "event" occurred on a straight stretch of track through a wooded area. A young woman had laid down across the tracks. It was early evening and Kniest was driving a local train at 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph). Dusk was already falling. "It looked like a trash bag," he says. He'd only been a train driver for a few weeks. He slammed on the brakes immediately.

It's no easier when it's a distracted pedestrian or a motorist disregarding the warnings.

"A trauma often renders people speechless," says Bruno Kall, a senior physician at the Buchenholm Clinic in Malente, located in northern Germany. Two decades ago, the clinic began specializing in the treatment of traumatized train drivers. The victims are literally speechless with horror.

A person who seeks death on the tracks doesn't just destroy their own life, they also disrupt the life of someone else. They turn train drivers into a perpetrator, someone who is forced to kill. They transform train drivers into murderers who are not guilty of their actions.

The Buchenholm Clinic is situated under tall trees on Dieksee Lake. The dining room offers a panoramic view of the water and it is a good place to find peace. What prompted the clinic to specialize in the trauma of train drivers? The clinic is a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bahn health insurance fund. In 1996, by which time Kall had already begun working as a doctor in Malente, a train driver being treated at the clinic began complaining of diffuse heart pain. Doctors performed an ultrasound but were unable to find anything causing the symptoms. At some point, the patient said that he had driven his locomotive into a group of workers. This led the doctors to conclude that the cause of his heart problems was not physical.

No, and helping the operator understand that he, too, has been trespassed against, is an important part of recovery.

The patient must learn that the train driver is not the perpetrator, but the victim. He may have been driving the locomotive, but he didn't kill anyone; the people who committed suicide did so themselves. Anger is good, says Kall, anger at the person who put you in this position. Anger helps the train driver escape from the role of perpetrator.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)