Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
---Dorothy Parker, Resume, 1926
The book is divided into two parts. The first half outlines a wide range of suicide-related topics: history of suicide; sociological, biological, and psychiatric views; why people kill themselves; intervention in suicide; assisted suicide in terminal illness; "living wills" and other advance directives; the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands and in the US.
The second half is an examination of how people kill themselves: This section describes, in sometimes-gory detail: (1) methods people use to commit suicide; (2) the medical consequences of suicide attempts; (3) how to carry out a safe suicidal gesture; (4) how to commit suicide as non-traumatically as possible.
You may find parts of it disturbing. But the consequences of ignorance are more disturbing: botched suicides, accidental deaths and maimed survivors, slow and painful deaths.
Every 18 minutes someone in the United States kills himself. A few are younger than ten years old; others over ninety. Between seven-and-a-half and sixteen percent take more than a day to die.
An estimated 300,000 to 600,000 survive suicide attempts, but suffer varying degrees of injury. Nineteen thousand are permanently disabled each year.
Estimates vary, but only about one in ten or twenty suicide attempts is fatal. Given the easy availability of highly lethal methods, it seems that most suicide attempters don't want to die.
Yet some people who didn't intend to die do kill themselves. Many lack knowledge of drugs and may unknowingly take a lethal overdose. Some expect rescuers to save them. Others, who are genuinely trying to die, live through their attempts. Many survive five-story jumps or head-in-the-oven gassing. Few have an accurate idea of how dangerous their chosen method is, or the consequences of its failure. Throughout the book, the author provides evidence of the medical effects of each suicide method so that you can make more realistic decisions, whether you're thinking about killing yourself or hoping to get help and attention. The author also cites his information sources in 40 pages of endnotes, so that you can readily look at the original data.
The material here is intended both for those who want a quick and relatively painless death, and for those who want to carry out a suicidal gesture as safely and non-injuriously as possible. If it convinces some potential suicides to seek other solutions--- suicide should be an absolutely last resort and mistakes may leave you crippled---so much the better. But the fact remains: there is no way to limit this knowledge to those whose motives one agrees with.
To make the author's premises explicit: (1) Decisions concerning your death should be, ultimately, yours to make; (2) Most--but not all--decisions to commit suicide are due to temporary problems, and are tragic mistakes.
For those who are religiously, philosophically, or ethically opposed to suicide under any circumstance, this publication will be of little comfort; those who believe that it is each person's right to decide, insofar as possible, when and how to die may find some answers to their questions and fears.
