context

It's estimated about a million people commit suicide every year which works out to about one every 30s. Public health workers are NOT going to overreact to your mention of suicidal ideation and a cry for help at whatever your commercial US Health care provider offers is more problematic still.

Suicide is very definitely a very effective solution to every problem you might have. Carbon monoxide is the least painful and easiest method available to most people who have a hard time with hanging or other trauma inducing methods.

It is true that in principle if you present to a public health facility or something and say that you are suicidal, you could be detained. In practice, short of some kind of special circumstances, it would be like applying for welfare, same amount of process. What will happen is that the worker will question you in some standard speech about whether you intend to "harm yourself". Saying flat out, "when I leave here I'm going to kill myself", could I suppose be a more effective way than applying to your local welfare/dole office, but the worker/staff will try to avoid this unless they make a judgement you can be blown off without consequence. A similar situation would apply outside of a public health service context, e.g. in US for someone with coverage thru typical providers, except that that determination will be affected by your coverage.

Below is a letter I sent to a feuilletonist that published a hack piece in Scientific American which I noticed earlier this week on the subject. The thing I refer to about comments there is an allusion to the general labor condition.


to: Jesse Bering
re: Your Selbstmord Serie

Juan Daugherty
Jan 22 (1 day ago)

I found your 2 part-er irritating and prosaic albeit competent
in the way such copy must be for you to get paid for it.

Here are, in very short, the main things I think you miss and
they're like everything:

o Suicide as such requires a "consciousness" of death
which animals purported to commit it lack. Vividly clear
in the case of insects lemmings, etc. that there isn't
any such which leads to ...

o As Man is the only being that does in fact consciously
choose death, we must be astounded at the rate at
which it does occur being absent in other megafauna.

Pieces like yours are always more or less oblivious
to the social conditions that are the real basis. It's
pretty bad for you to be aggravating the obliviousness
on that point.

As an aside I was unable to post this comment on the
SciAm site easily because their social login stuff doesn't
work at least on Linux, probably spotty elsewhere. That
that is the case is an example of the social conditions
I refer to.

I didn't address many other specious elements but you're
probably already aware of them (e.g, the fatuity of the
genetics spiel).




What it feels like to want to kill yourself