All you feel is pain and anxiety. Despair and hopelessness consume you… and you just wish that the mind that has gotten you into so much trouble had an ‘off’ switch. You wish that you could ‘think’ yourself out of existence.

Yes, your situation is unique and, yes, your suffering is very great. It is very likely that no-one that is close to you truly understands or appreciates what you are going through. You hurt so much that you ache physically… and no words or condolences can suffice to soothe your agony.

Firstly, I want to express my heartfelt compassion and sympathy for what you are going through.

Now, let’s take a step back and rationalize how you got to this very dark space. Mainly, suicidal thoughts come from one of two things 1. A major traumatic incident or 2. A long course of suffering and adversity or 3. Both of the previous points.

Either way, feeling suicidal isn’t necessarily ‘irrational’ or ‘stupid’ and doesn’t automatically indicate that you have mental health issues. What it does indicate, however, is that your pain is getting to the point of outweighing your coping resources.

So let’s look at it graphically… The scales below represent your emotional state. On the left hand side you have your coping resources and on the right hand side you have your pain.

Coping resources could be anything that helps you to handle an emotional crisis and to maintain the initiative when things get rough. Now, I believe that there are two principal categories of coping resources – the band aids and the medicines.

 Band aids are things that you use to get you through times of peak crisis.

• Talking to friends and family or to a helpline
• Chatting to people online
• Breathing exercises
• Journaling or writing a letter to yourself
• Anything else that you could use to distract your mind.

Medicines are things that can help stave off and prevent the crises or serve to minimise their dramatic impact on our emotional stability. The three prominent ‘medicinal’ coping resources that I believe are available to all of us are as follows:

• Love
• Learning
• Self-acceptance

Love doesn’t necessarily need to be love from other people. The more we think about and foster love for others – even those least deserving of our love – the more we will feel its soothing balm in our lives. Love for others doesn’t need to be expressed in some grandiose way… it doesn’t need to be demonstrated with great acts of benevolence or kindness. The key is to love – in thought and in deed – little and often.

Learning something new gives our brain a workout and gives it something to feed on rather than feeding on our problems and negative self-talk. A stagnated brain is like a garden covered in weeds – something easy to get depressed by. By constantly learning, we help to keep our brain ‘in shape’ and feel more empowered to make positive changes in our lives.

Self-acceptance is a big downer for many people as a low self-esteem can lead to feelings of great loneliness and isolation. Constant yearning for connection and acceptance are things that affect many people in society. When we find the pearl of goodness latent inside every one of us and genuinely start to appreciate it and develop it, this serves as a significant catalyst for change and self-acceptance.

As we work on building up our coping resources, we can better equip ourselves for riding out the rough times and we are better able to cope with emotional crises in a balanced frame of mind.

Now the thing with pain is that it’s largely a matter of perspective. I say this more from a rational perspective than from a warm fuzzy emotional perspective. A 10 meter wave looks infinitely more fearsome if you are sitting in the trough and waiting for it to crash mercilessly over you… than if you are looking at it from the vantage point of a light-house keeper perched high in his sanctuary of calm.

You might now say ‘what’s the relevance of perspective?’ Well the thing is that if you are in a crisis and feel that your coping resources are failing you then working on finding perspective to your pain can be very effective…

 Time is a very gentle and powerful healer… and will often bring perspective and peace to even the most traumatic of incidents. Recalling earlier experiences of crisis and how you got through them can help shine perspective into your desolate cave of suffering as can listening to others recount feelingly how they survived an emotional Auschwitz.

Whatever it is that has brought you to this place my friend, I want you to know that I truly believe you have the strength to get through it… and to come out the other side with greater strength, wisdom and compassion than ever before.

About the Author: Cody has studied psychology and self-help strategies for over a decade and is very passionate about helping others to fulfill their potential and live happier lives. 

Somewhere in the midst of that despair comes forth an idea. What if I kill myself in such a way that it looks like an accident? After all, people die all the time – it is sad but we get over it and it does not have the same stigma of “suicide” and maybe it will hurt a little bit less to those I leave behind (that claim to care but I am not really sure they do). Maybe they do not realize it but they would be better off without me anyway. Maybe it is life insurance to end the financial troubles, maybe it is because our moods and depression or anger and outburst make those around us hurt already. It might be in our mind if we were gone then the wife or husband could meet a better person be more able to provide for the kids, or the parents would not have to support you and worry anymore.

These and thoughts like these have probably gone through your head many times if you found your way here and are reading this. They all have occurred to me many times in the last few years since I got sick. The reason they are in your head might be different – financial problems, loneliness, divorce, break up, abuse, alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, hundreds of possibilities (or even just horrible soul killing depression without any specific cause you can point to as a reason) but it does make them any less real or easier to deal with.

The reason is really not that important- if you were able to think of a way to fix it you would have and since you can’t now you are trying to figure out how to make the pain stop, and just maybe not to have to let the world ever know what happened. There is a very good chance you have spent a lifetime of holding it in and keeping the real truth a secret- so making suicide look like an accident would just be the same as that fake smile you put on to go to work or school every day. Just the next (and final) lie you say to try to protect others from your pain and yourself from facing the truth.

The hard part of all this is remembering- it never really did do any good to put on that fake smile. It may work for some or in some situations, but it did not for you because here you are still looking for a way to make the pain stop and still looking for a way to make it look like it was never there. Just like the fake smile did not make the pain stop for you – it just made it harder for others to see, making suicide look like an accident does not stop the pain on others, just makes it harder for people to understand why they hurt so much. Whether declared an accident or suicide does not change the last days / weeks / months with these people. They still feel or know that something was wrong and still have no way to ever fix that- simply to live forever with it unresolved.

While you are considering the “accident” to try to stop the pain, you are not stopping the pain at all- you are simply negotiating your spouse’s, children’s, or friend’s pain. It is not stopping the pain, it is you deciding how much pain they should feel or that you are okay with causing them. How many times in your life when thinking of others, truly thinking of others- do you start bargaining and negotiating how much pain it is okay to lay on another person? And still think what you are doing is a righteous or good thing?

The real truth is all suicides are accidents. Nobody purposely made decisions intended to cause so much pain they would rather die than wake up. Nobody let things build to a point that it was all intolerable, or asked for so many issues to be visited upon them they could not deal with it anymore on purpose. The fact you feel like this at all is the culmination of a series of accidents. While feeling so alone and in pain you would rather die is not your fault, the things causing that amount of pain are making you unable to see that killing yourself (accident or not) is not going to end that pain. If successful at best it takes your and pain adds to it and then passes it on to many others, letting that pain multiply and grow like some vicious weed choking the life out of all the once strong beautiful plants around it.

I have been very sure in my life that nothing else could ever stop that pain, nothing else would ever make things even a little okay again. I have seen thousands of others on the forum feeling the same way. We were all wrong. When things have gotten better and then there is another downturn we all said “see -it never gets better and even if it does it gets worse again” but the reality is that just a few days either way before or after that feeling that feeling had changed. Unfortunately, it is that hopeless feeling that we choose to cling to and nurture that is causing the pain, not the life around that feeling.

Suicides that look like accidents? It is fool’s gold at best. A way to put on the fake smile that never fooled you nor anybody else in your life and then trying to continue that lie into death. It does not make it better. I will tell you what I know about accidents and suicide. I know several people that have started a suicide attempt and called for help-, but the help was too late. The permanent damage or death was already done. In fact in near every suicide case I am personally familiar with they tried to reach out and get help in the end- they tried to not die- but that is when the accident happened. That is when it was too late to fix and then came the accident, so commonly called tragedy like every accident, and they died finally wanting nothing but to live.

There will be comments left on here complaining about the “you did not tell me about how to make it look like an accident” with expletives. There are on other posts too, though for some reason the person chose to read to the end knowing that it was not going to be in there. Asking how to make suicide look like an accident is no different than asking about methods to die- the real truth anybody could think of many ways without a pause. You are not searching for a way to make suicide look like an accident or searching for a way to die – those are both way too easy and anyone could list a dozen ways. You are searching for a way to make the pain stop.

The pain can stop and life can be better. It is not easy and it is not going to change overnight. The answer is different for every person because every life is different so you can’t get your answer in 1000 words when you haven’t found the answer in months or years or searching for it on your own – I am not smarter than you. It will not happen without you letting some things change as well. You can’t keep everything the exact same and suddenly feel differently about it. But life can change and the pain can stop and there can be contentment and happiness. You just need to spend as much time and diligence on trying to figure out the method you need to change your life as you are on searching for methods and ways to die.

The method to change your life is actually something that you might be able to find some help with and that you do not already know 10 ways in your mind. That is what you are searching for and trying to find how to live and how to stop the pain. If you think I am lying then tell me that there were not just at least 2 or 3 ways to make it look like an accident when you commit suicide in your mind as you read this or searched this topic, but here you are reading and searching like there were none. There are nearly 55,000 members on SF that do and have felt the same, and they are getting better. Not all, not every day, but the majority get here looking for how to die, and yet days, weeks, even years later they are still here. And life is better, because if it was not they would not be here either. Talk to people that care now.

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.