Are there any painless suicide methods?

Most people find SF when the pain is so bad that they can’t take it any more. That is how I found SF. If you are here, reading this, the chances are you are so tired of hurting, so exhausted by the relentless black hole of pain inside you that you are looking for a way, ANY way, to make it stop. Painless suicide methods seem like the holy grail right now. I get it – believe me – I understand.

Are There Any Painless Suicide Methods?

The simple answer is no. I understand that your instinct now is to click off this page and keep looking, but STOP. Wait. Just stay a few minutes. The problem with suicide methods is that up to 97% of the time, they fail. And that is just the completely committed “I want to die right now this second” group. Suicide is painful and messy and horrifying – and I completely understand if you are sitting here thinking “yes, well so is my life” – I have been there.

One of the most common things our members say when they first join SF is ‘I am too much of a coward to go through with it”. Not killing yourself isn’t cowardly. Not killing yourself isn’t weak or spineless. It is okay to scream for help at the top of your lungs right now – you deserve help and nobody can do this alone.

We have thousands and thousands of members and each and every one of them knows what it feels like to want to fall asleep and never wake up. To stop the pain – for it to be easy and peaceful and painless. Suicide isn’t any of those things. It is painful and lonely and scary. The thoughts and feelings you are dealing with are not shameful or weak or wrong – but really wanting to die and really wanting to make the pain stop are not the same thing. 

What About Pain Free Death?

It is easy to believe – especially right now – that it wouldn’t matter if you died. Nobody would care. I don’t know you and I don’t know what is going on in your life (I would like to) but I have been suicidal and believed those things, and I have talked to hundreds and hundreds of people who also believe those things. Pain lies. Depression lies. Most of all, despair lies. The idea that your death would not matter and it wouldn’t hurt anyone – that your suicide would be pain free for all concerned – it isn’t true. Maybe you want to believe it is true because you don’t want to hurt any of the people you love. Maybe you hurt so badly you can’t see past the pain to the truth. But you are wrong. There are no ‘pain free’ ways to die. There are especially no pain free ways to kill yourself. Not just the physical messy agony of suicide itself, which is never like it is in the movies, but also the emotional pain you are passing to the people who are about you and even the people who ‘only’ know you.

The pain can go away. I know you don’t believe me; I didn’t believe it either. I was sure – 100% definite – that life would never get better, that the pain would never go away, that I would never feel okay again, let alone happy. I felt alone and isolated and like there was nobody to talk to who could possibly understand. I was wrong. About all of it. There are people who understand and who will support you and while right now you don’t think support can help and you don’t see how talking can make a difference, there is something about NOT feeling alone and isolated that eases the pain just enough to be able to breathe for a minute. To be able to think. To give yourself a chance.

You Need to Talk to Someone

There is no replacement for professional medical treatment. If you are suicidal then you need real medical help – but you also need to talk to people you can be honest with, people you can say out loud “I hurt so much I want to die” to. It is hard, almost impossible, to say those things to people who know and care about you in real life. They get scared and hurt and suddenly you are not only dealing with your own pain, you are dealing with theirs as well. For people who already have more pain than they can bear, that is not an option.

Talking doesn’t magically make the pain go away. I am not going to sit here and lie to you that it might. I understand that it is hard to see the point – the POINT is that you want to make the pain stop and if talking won’t do that then it can feel like a waste of the precious little energy you have left. What talking does – in a peer to peer setting – is make you feel less alone. Knowing that people understand and care, that even strangers who are in pain themselves care about you enough to listen and support you, can make you feel less isolated, remind you that you do not have to deal with this alone. 

Talk to us. Write down how you feel. Engage with people who understand – as much as anyone can understand – how you feel. The pain won’t go away overnight but it CAN go away and you deserve to have support while you deal with it. So instead of clicking off here and going back to Google in search of ways to die, stick around here. Join our community and find ways to make the pain go away that don’t involve killing yourself – ways to make the pain go away that give you your life back. 

Do you feel like you really just hate yourself? Check this out. 

Having a hard time thinking about getting from today until tomorrow? Try this one. 

If I put this as a poll I am sure there would be all the obvious guesses and some creative things as well, but the methods and things that are killing more than 2000 people per day around the world have very little to do with what they endured the final few minutes of their life and everything to do with what they endured during the weeks or even years before those final few minutes. The things they felt in the time leading up the final minutes are what killed them and more importantly, nearly all of these things could be addressed in other ways if only somebody had taken the time to really listen and try to help.

The list I am going to share is the list of things that are killing nearly a million people a year. From the site, I have come to understand what many suicidal people I have personally spoke with were dealing with. These are the things that are killing the people, and unlike the searches for painless methods and easy methods, these are all marked by incredibly intense and unendurable pain, a pain so bad that somebody would literally rather die than face another hour of it. In no particular order –

1. Break ups – Whether it is a divorce after year sand the loss of a family or the first love of a young teen that lasted a few months. The thing to remember about this is it is not a break up and go on to the next for all people. For some it is the first or only person in the world they ever loved or felt loved by and without that person they cannot see a possibility of love in their life again. Life without the possibility of love is hard thing to face. The real issue here is if there was enough love around them when they felt this way, most would realize that it is not going to be a life without love, but simply a life without that love- still painful, but maybe bearable. It is the lack of love they feel from all sources that make them believe it will be a life of no love at all, and it is what they feel that fuels their pain, not what others think.
2. Failure– Real or perceived is really of no matter. Maybe they were fired from a job, or did not make a sports team, got bad grades in school, or just didn’t finish a project on time. The difference in spending a lifetime of savings and years into a failed business, or getting cut from the Varsity team is measured by the person feeling it, not what happened. Whatever the failure or series of failures, in the end they do not see themselves as anything but a failure and their shame will not allow them to entertain the possibility that others see them differently.
3. Money – Life is hard and everybody is ultimately controlled to some extent by money. The adages od money can’t buy happiness are true, but it is also true that it is hard to be happy if you are facing homelessness, or feel ashamed when people ask you what you do. There are some that would rather die than face the idea of accepting help freely offered, and the real truth is there is not enough help anyway for those that really need it. When every thought of your day is on how you will pay for something or how to support yourself and your family some people start seeing themselves as just another bill and part of the problem.
4. Rejection and feeling excluded – Everybody faces rejection at some point in their life. Some people cannot ever remember feeling anything else. It may be because they never have, or it may be because the overwhelming sense of rejection from an incident blinds them to past successes, but in the end they die because their feeling of rejection is greater than the total of positive input form others in their lives to help them feel something different. They know they will never fit in because everything they feel tells them that. It may be they feel excluded from all the others and rejected by friends that were too busy to call, or that every girl they ever spoke to said no to a date, but they would rather die than let another rejection add more to the overwhelming pain they already feel.
5. Being left behind – Some people look around and see everybody they went to school with already has a job, marriage, house etc. Maybe it is even a simple as their friends already have girlfriends or boyfriends, or perhaps they are approaching middle age and realizing the dream of family and children is becoming impossible, or elderly and need to accept those possibilities are gone. In the end, they see everybody else as so far ahead of them and they cannot see a way to ever catch up.
6. Loneliness – some people truly have no family and no friends. Some people are surrounded by others all day but feel like they have to hide their real selves so much that nobody really knows them. If nobody knows them then they feel just as alone as somebody that has nobody in their lives at all. Humans are social animals, and isolation and seclusion have been used as punishment and even torture for centuries. It is hardly surprising that if somebody equates their life to something used as torture that ending that existence seems a better choice.
7. Feeling irrelevant – All anybody really wants to do is make a difference. When the feeling that it no longer matters what you do or think has any value to anybody becomes pervasive enough it is hard to hold on to a will to live. If a person believes were they gone nobody would be impacted, it is hard to find a way to face even the simplest of struggles in daily life because they feel there is no reason to anymore.
8. Physical health – Some social scientists have theorized when a person’s body begins to fail them it is a clear evolutionary sign that it is time to die and that invokes a response in the brain to do that. If that is true or not is open to debate, but when disease, frailty of age, or simply bad luck results in the loss of physical ability, plus the fact this is sometimes combined with very real physical pain, it is seen by many as a sure sign that it is time to give in and die. The loss of health regardless of cause is a reminder of ultimate mortality and then it is becomes more of a question of when and how. Fear and pain added to the natural urge to control one’s own fate make this result in premature death for millions.
9. Being a burden – This is when a person feels the cost of others for their own existence is greater their contribution. It may be completely inaccurate or it may be a fact that using a slide rule would have a financial advantage if they were not there, but being a burden and contributing are based on far more than dollars and cents. The intangibles are there, but if a person cannot see them or does not feel them all that is left is the feeling that the people they love would be better off if they were not there and the taking of their life as the last thing they have to offer to make life better for those around them.
10. Mental Illness –In nearly all of the above situations some form of mental illness may play a part. Depression and anxiety can certainly result from many of these situations and feelings. The illness then takes on a life of its own and needs to be treated and dealt with. There is however the very real fact that sometimes it is just the mental illness that made a person feel a certain way, or caused them to be in these situations. Since many estimate a full third or even more of people with mental illness never receive any treatment at all it is unsurprising that even the more treatable mental illnesses have a higher mortality rate then some forms of cancer.

If you or somebody you know has ever felt like these situation apply, or maybe feel some of these things now, get help. Even just consider talking to others that do and have felt the same way. It will not solve the problem, and it will not make the problem disappear overnight, but it will be easier to understand. A chance to talk without worrying about what the people listening are thinking because they have felt the same things is a valuable experience.

Knowing others have felt the same way and finding out that there are ways to make the pain stop without dying has value. In the end, people die because it is the only way they can find to stop the pain. If someone is looking for a way to stop the pain and have not found it by themselves, they should talk to a professional. If they cannot or don’t feel ready for that, then try talking to people that understand, are willing to listen, and that will not judge in our community forum and chatrooms.

Start creating your plan at a moment when you’re still capable of feeling some hope, and have some belief that life is worth living. If you can’t imagine feeling that way, then get someone who cares about you and knows you well to help. Start by writing down a collection of warning signs that you are starting to become severely depressed and suicidal. These warning signs will help you and others recognize when you are likely to need extra support. Examples of warning signs might be, “Withdrawing from friends and family,” or “loss of interest in hobbies.”

Next, write down a list of coping strategies that you can use to make yourself feel a bit better. Some people take a hot shower, or cuddle with a pet, or take a walk. The goal isn’t to make you feel all the way better immediately. There may be nothing that can do that. The point is to give you some things to try before you give up completely. Sometimes even feeling a tiny bit better can be enough to take your mind off suicide.

The next step is to write down the names and phone numbers of family and friends who might be able to help you when you are suicidal. You might want to call and talk to these people first and ask them if you can put them on your emergency list. If you know ahead of time that it’s okay to call someone at two in the morning when you’re at the end of your strength, then you won’t feel reluctant to call when you’re in crisis.

Finally, write a list of professional people you can call in case of emergency, along with their phone numbers. Include your doctor, counselor if you have one, and the number for the local hospital. Again, it’s a good idea to find out ahead of time what will happen if you call after hours. You don’t want to be stuck talking to an answering machine if you’re in crisis!

Share your suicide safety plan with supportive people who are close to you, so they know how to take care of you if you become suicidal. Keep it with you in your purse or wallet. If you’re worried about someone finding it and judging you, just don’t label it “Suicide Safety Plan.” Call it something like “Important Phone Numbers.”

If suicidal thoughts and feelings strike, keep going step by step through your plan until you feel safe.