For many people, one of the primary motivators of suicide is specifically to hurt those they leave behind, as punishment for making their lives miserable. Nonetheless, to extend this to a complete stranger who happens to be driving a train toward you is to be angry at the entire human race and to hold everyone responsible for your misery. If there's such a thing as a rational suicide, this sure ain't it. Back home, one guy simply jumped off the sidewalk and ran into the path of a lumber truck. Again, not cool.
A friend of a friend jumped in front of a train and ...survived. Paralyzed from neck down. She said she didnt know how else to escape her abusive husband, ended up worse than dead.
I suppose it would help if they were out waiting for them with a big target on their chests. It's better than traumatising poor subway drivers.
The thing about suiciders is they're so desperate they usually don't do the required research.:shrug:
In Europe a common method is to just crash your car into a large solid object. Both Daimler-Benz and Volvo have a team of forensic engineers who rush to the site of a fatal crash of one of their cars within their own country, to help them build better cars. They have tacit permission not to share their findings with police or insurance investigators. To their surprise they found that a large number of fatal single-car "accidents" were actually suicides. Suicide voids a life insurance policy, so if you make it look like an accident your spouse (or other beneficiary) will be able to collect on the policy.
heh, what useless, utterly shallow and tired rhetoric. some people's families are the problem and they don't give a shit or they are abusive. some people's friends cannot help or they don't understand etc. everyone's situation is different.
Ms Birch, have you been suicidal? What are your thoughts on that state? http://strangethingslikeme.blogspot.com/2011/04/to-non-depressives-suicidality-for-n00b.html.
Bridge supports have become well protected for a reason. I'm quite interested in how they can tell the difference between suicide and say, falling asleep at the wheel? I would imagine some actions could look almost identical, with differing intent.
Taking a guess here. Falling asleep at the wheel generally involves weaving around; I've had to pull over before when I started hitting the plastic bumps glued to the road, "driving by braille." You would probably also slow down as loss of conscious control made your foot lose tension on the pedal. Suicide would involve a rapid acceleration and aiming at the support directly. Considering how well cars are built these days, in order to kill yourself I imagine you'd have to nail the support at upwards of 60 MPH. Probably 80 to be an assured kill if you drove the front end into the support. I say this because... When I went off the road due to lack of paying attention and slammed into a concrete culvert, I was doing about 40-45. The car wasn't airbag-equipped. I got to set off metal detectors with my left arm for a while and have my eyebrow sewn back together. My arm was across the wheel-I was trying to steer out when I hit. With a better car, I probably would have just had some serious bruising, the torn muscle from the seatbelt, whiplash, and a purple tongue (nearly bit the tip of it off...oops).
Doesn't that depend on how intelligently they plan the suicide? Especially if they're trying to make it look like an accident? Most people speed anyway, so I wouldn't instantly recognise that as a suicide attempt. You say falling asleep at the wheel involves weaving, but surely that's the process of falling asleep, not the final time where you finally do fall asleep and actually make impact? Or perhaps they deliberately brake late to make it look like they tried to stop. Obviously the odds of that coinciding with a bridge support and being a genuine accident are low, but still, if they're attempting to be conclusive they should consider all things.
Once you're in a nursing home, unable to walk or even feed yourself, which is when you might really like to have that freedom, it's gone. Even if you have a DNR order on file the odds are high that it will not be respected.
One morning on my way to work about 30 years ago, the guy in the car directly in front of me started weaving. We were in the fast lane and he first weaved to the right across two lanes until both his right side tires went up on the curb, just before hitting a telephone pole he popped off the curb and weaved back across 3 lanes into the on coming traffic and ran head on into a car coming the other direction. Fortunately at that time the speed was only about 30 mph, but that was before airbags. Later I read in the paper that the guy that started weaving had a heart attack and died before the crash.
I remember when I was younger. I was driving home with a friend and he fell asleep at the wheel. It was late so I was also sleeping. I just so happened to wake up at the right second, as his car was heading off the highway toward an exist sign. I grabbed the wheel from the passengers seat and steered down down the off ramp and then up the other side of the ramp back onto the high way. He was still in control of the accelerator as he slept. My friend then woke after I returned on the highway, and then continued on with the drive like nothing happened. I didn't say anything at first. It took me a few minutes before I could tell him we almost had an accident. I wanted to stop shaking first.
One thing I liked about the old cars was they had a true hand-operated "emergency brake" under the middle of the dashboard that the passenger could reach in event of a--duh!--emergency. Today they're more usually foot-operated so they're on the floor and over by the door, so there's no way anyone but the driver can actuate it. I know they're not very strong and might not bring the car to a complete stop if the driver is pressing on the throttle, but geeze they're a whole lot better than nothing! One thing you can do from the passenger seat is shift the transmission into neutral. That won't stop the car but at least it will let it slow down from road friction, as long as you're not headed downhill. That may give you enough time to fight your way to the brake pedal. (Of course if the driver is not dead you can use that time to start pounding on his head to wake him up.) Don't try to shift into Reverse, which sounds like a great idea, because modern cars have an interlock to prevent that since it will destroy the transmission at any speed over about 5mph. An older car will let you do it but it will indeed destroy the transmission so it won't actually make the wheels start turning backwards.
I read an article a while back on suicide, written by academic researchers from Harvard university. Their claim is that people generally do not actually want to die. However, they are in pain, and they want the pain to end. Tragically, some of them cannot think of any other way to end the pain.
