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Comment by jackvalentine | Hacker News Reader

Successful suicide is a function of desire and access to means. You can work on either, or both at the same time.

Desire and access to means are not orthogonal. As desire increases, effective access to means increases. Anything can become a weapon if you're desperate enough.

That’s true. But it’s also true that people with access to more effective methods are successful more often.

Indeed, because the barrier becomes lower. It's common in interaction design to purposefully guard a certain action with more clicks/steps in order to reduce the likelihood of the action being overused or abused. It appears to work for websites, for example HN makes you click the timestamp if you want to flag a comment, which likely deters knee-jerk flags.

Yeah good example. I don't think we're saying anything particularly groundbreaking here.

If internet forums were meant for only the groundbreaking, they would be barren places, no?

I say it because I was surprised at the offense some people took to the idea!

What do we say to the people who we takes the means from? "We don't trust you with these tools?". I personally find such control very insulting. At the same time, I respect their desire if it's well thought-out.

I don't know. I'm not suggesting any course of action.

Comments like this make me sigh at the gulf of brilliance and borderline mental disability of HN.

Literally every single person contemplating suicide has access to means. Every single one. No matter how much regulation is imposed which is why it is stupid to attempt to regulate to begin with and usually used as a means to push a secondary agenda. Even someone strapped to a bed and force fed will eventually die from the process.

The only cure for suicide it access to mental health assistance and reasonable living conditions. Even that won't "cure" someone who truly wants to die.

I love how you've assumed from my comment a large range of 'secondary agendas' rather than just the face value of my words.

Also I very much appreciate your bad-faith implication that I have a mental disability. Thanks for that.

Please don't get uncivil, just because someone else wrote an uncharitable comment. It only makes the thread worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please edit out name-calling from your comments here, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Remember this one too: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

> ...every single person contemplating suicide has access to means... No matter how much regulation is imposed...

Your comment might get hidden because it was flagged, but your points need to be addressed. Suicide contemplation is a function of desire, so restricting access to means may help deter some of the people who have a weaker desire to commit suicide.

> The only cure for suicide it access to mental health assistance and reasonable living conditions. Even that won't "cure" someone who truly wants to die.

This may be the best long term "solution" to suicide. The fundamental problem isn't that people are killing themselves, it's that people want to be dead. It seems unscalable to try and "solve" the problem by banning every conceivable thing that could be used as a weapon. That doesn't solve the problem any more than spraying green paint on diseased grass fixes your yard; it is a superficial fix.

Society should be measured not only by its economic output, but also by the percentage of people who would rather be dead than live in it. You can't conclude if a monkey has patience if you don't give it access to a banana. Only when the monkey has access to the banana and refuses it, can you conclude that the monkey has learned patience.

Reducing access to means and methods is one of the best ways to reduce the numbers of people who kill themselves.

There have been a number of natural experiments that have shown this: when the UK switched from coal gas to natural gas, or when catalytic converters were introduced.

You can probably find research to support this on the NCISH website.

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