not getting into methods, just some biology about what I understand causes people to die
Everyone dies from lack of oxygen to the brain, be it heart failure (heart stops pumping blood, your brain stops receiving it, vital oxygen deprived and goodbye you), liver failure, kidney failure or systemic infection. Even respiratory distress ultimately comes down to the oxygen not being absorbed in the lungs, so it can’t be provided in sufficient quantities to your brain, and so you die. Heck, even nervous system damage is not so serious until it ceases to provide the right signals to your lungs and heart, and whichever mechanism leads to your brain not getting enough oxygen.
I’m hoping this doesn’t cross the border into literal method, but we all think about death quite a bit, a bit of science behind it seems like a good thing.
Now the issue I’ve found is the more indirect the method of action, the higher chances of failure and long term damage.
Take liver failure as an example. You ingest enough of a substance processed by the liver that it overwhelms it, and the liver dies. What happens then is either necrosis spreading to your other organs or heart failure, with the necrosis option being the worse of the two in terms of pain. The problem here is that the liver is a vital organ, several hundred million years of evolution have made it a resilient little bugger of an organ. So your chances are higher of harming but not killing your liver, and THAT specifically is a miserable outcome.
I encourage anyone interested to look into people suffering liver failure, which is often slow, painful, and in short a pain in the ass. Which is why I think any method that relies on liver failure to be an ill fated and ill advised method.
The same is true for similar reasons in the kidneys. Kidneys also filter blood, and if they shut down you’re in for some serious pain. The problem, again, is resilience. Your kidneys have redundancy, in that you start out with two of them. Further, they are a far more likely transplant to be available given everyone else has a spare as well. “So I’m good, right?” You may wonder, and you’d be wrong. Partial failure is truly awful, ask a diabetic. Which leads to the larger problem; failing kidneys are far too common to bank on recovery efforts.
I go through all this trouble for several reasons.
One is that I am personally musing on death, and have made up my mind that either of the above two indirect methods are by definition worse than whatever mental illness leads one to that desperation.
The second is less selfish. I read quite a lot of posts on here by some fairly determined people. Though it would be ideal to talk people out of every attempt, that isn’t realistic. Someone reading this might be mulling over their own death and lacking the science education to just know these things. I’m really sick of seeing suicidal people do stupid things, aka causing long term damage. Yes, mental illness does that too, but the issue is avoidable harm. You probably don’t have a choice about being in anxiety or depression, you can’t opt out.
but you can opt in to an awful method, and you’d be better off even if your goal is death if you avoid methods that are indirect if possible. Most of us feel guilty about the burden we represent to society, if you induce liver or kidney failure you will be more of a drag on the people around you. In short this unselfish impulse expresses as the most selfish outcome. It would seem to follow that would make you feel worse.
So what do you guys think? Am I way off here? Or are these biological methods of expiring as avoidable as I imply?
You’ll note that at no point did I actually give the means to attain such failure, they are out there for the curious and you don’t need me for it. Rather, if you’re thinking about it, look at the mechanism of action, the kidneys you save may be your own.