>>13115
The problem is that while on paper this sounds like it works, in practice the human brain has a deep rooted evolutionary terror of not being able to breath. So often, especially on /r9k/ there's stories of people determined to use this technique and the brain just instinctively freaks the fuck out when your air supply is low. Now you can get around that by using powerful drugs or through extensive meditation and self-hypnosis to put yourself in a trance. But possibilities of failure still are likely:
>==Inert Gas Suicide: How to Reduce Panic==
>Many right-to-die societies and their suicide guidebooks insist that inert gas suicide is absolutely pain-free because what causes alarm and air hunger is high CO2 concentration, not low O2 concentration. While this is true for most people, there is some minority who experience panic or some other uncomfortableness that intensifies exponentially as one approaches loss of consciousness (LOC), even though they carfully followed all the guidelines and kept CO2 concentration at its minimum. They often abort their suicide attempts because of this. Below, I try to identify this phenomenon and suggest some methods to help overcome it.
>(i) Some evidence that this phenomenon exists, and that this phenomenon is panic.
>First, suicide attempters who used asphyxiation methods (inert gas, suspension hanging, debreather) but aborted in the process have one thing in common: the timing. Almost everyone abort or "chickens out" from their attempt *just before* loss of cnosciousness, when they feel dizziness and when their vision starts to grey out. Almost no one abort before that. For example, a woman on her 80s took 6 tablets of flunitrazepam and used debreather to kill herself. It was peaceful at first, but when the oxygen contentration inside debreather fell to about 5-7%, the woman fought off the mask. She tried again, but same happened. A total of 4 attempts have gone to failure because she somehow tried to fought off the mask whenever the oxygen contentration reaches 5-7%. (Source: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/07481181003613792) This odd consistency in timing suggests that there is *something* that prevents people from losing consciousness..
>Second, what they feel is similar. Usually a (mild) sense of fear/terror/alarm, accelerating heart rate, chest pain, air hunger, tingling sensation, or a feeling that "something is going wrong, I must stop this NOW and try fresh again later" (which can be broadly interpreted as an "urge to flee"). Interestingly, these are the most common symptoms reported by patients with respiratory-subtype panic disorder. Therefore, I suspect that what suicide attempters experienced is panic. I mean, literally, the psychiatric meaning of panic (respiratory subtype, to be exact).
>Some people (most notably Exit International) suggest that this is solely caused by CO2, but I don't believe it. There are many cases where CO2 concentration must have been very very low. An example is the debreather case I mentioned earlier. I think, for some people, hypoxia itself is enough to cause panic, although, I admit, hypoxia plus hypercapnia is worse than hypoxia alone.
>Some non-human animals also experience panic when O2 concentration becomes sufficiently low. A few studies identified the threshold O2 concentration for rats to be around 7% (https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2015.08.045), which correlates closely with the number from the debreather case. Also, euthanising a pig with helium is seen to ellicit what looks like panic response just before LOC (https://youtu.be/cqaPZR4M22w).
>(ii) How to reduce panic
>There are many known panicolytics, so we can just.. use them. (1) Take alprazolam, clonazepam, or alcohol (liquor) acutely (30-60 mins before doing it), or (2) take antidepressants (either fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline, citalopram, escitalopram, fluvoxamine, imipramine, clomipramine, venlafaxine, or tianeptine; Reboxetine and bupropion won't work; St John's Wort might work) chronically (for more than 3 weeks).
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