I saw a movie over the weekend (I won’t spoil it by saying which one) in which one of the lead characters is so distraught they walk into a lake in a attempt to commit suicide by drowning themselves. Assuming there are no drugs or alcohol involved is it even possible to commit suicide this way?
Unlike jumping off a bridge in which the fall will likely kill you, when you deprive yourself of oxygen your CO2 reaches a certain level and you will have an uncontrollable urge to breath. Can a normal person just turn off that urge?
Now if you chain yourself to something heavy you will drown because you won’t be able to fight your way back to the surface, but with nothing holding you under the water can you just drown yourself?
Considering the paradoxical behaviors that drowning people engage in, I would not be surprised at all if you could intentionally drown yourself, assuming you didn’t legitimately change your mind about suicide midway - and even then you might be out of luck. (I read an account of someone who survived his leap off the Golden Gate Bridge, who suddenly realized after leaping that all his past mistakes except for what he’d just done could be fixed somehow.)
I think the plan with intentional drowning is just to swim out until you’re too tired to keep swimming. Wouldn’t work very well in a small pond but a larger body of water would work just fine.
Note that it was relatively recently that everyone cold swim. It was no unusual for adults to not learn how, so if they got in water over their heads, they’d be helpless.
I have a friend who almost drowned and he told me that he tried to hold his breath for as long as he could but eventually, your body just breathes anyway - regardless of what you want to do.
He said that he breathed in water and it was the most painful thing he ever did. Fortunately, some lifeguard was handy and save him.
But, it leads me to conclude that drowning is not the best way to suicide.
Jumping off a tall building is not good either since many people actually live even after falling a huge distance. But they break so many bones and suffer such horrible debilitating injuries that for the rest of their lives all they do is sit around and wish they had never tried to kill themselves that way.
No matter how you go about it, suicide just doesn’t seem like a very good course of action. I would suggest you find some alternative.
It’s actually pretty hard to drown yourself without going to substantial effort, like jumping off a boat with weights attached to your legs, swimming out so far you can’t swim back in the ocean, or some of the other extraordinary circumstances mentioned itt.
If you try to hold your head under a lake or in the bathtub or something, when you lose consciousness, assuming you make it that far, your head will come out of the water and you will try to breathe.
People know how to surface swim , Aussie crawl, specifically, (lets not start on why its incorrectly called “freestyle” !) but underwater swimming? Do they realise that breast stroke is just fine underwater ? Do they even know breaststroke for use at the surface?
Also, getting water in your lungs can be deadly on its own. I say this because its important to seek expert examination after a near drowning… Always call the ambulance for someone who isn’t rapidly improving after being under the water.
Last month, a Washington DC officer who had been arrested and charged for producing child pornography stripped naked, walked in the Potomac River and drowned himself (good riddance).
Plenty of people don’t know how to swim (there was a thread some months ago on this topic. Some people seem genuinely surprised that not everybody has been taught to swim). And many more swim poorly, including myself. Drop me in a lake and unless the shore is close, I’m going to drown, willing or not. If it’s in a river, currents will also get many more people.
Humans do not (only) naturally float with nose and mouth above water. If you go unconscious in the water without a floating device to turn you the right way, chances are you’ll drown.
FWIW, a (quasi) fictional character in the Riverworld series killed himself multiple times via self-drowning (the historical explorer Richard Burton transported to a fictional realm).
I can’t crawl worth shit; my swimming lessons were the worst part of my summers for many years because the monitors would insist on me crawling on the surface while my instinct was to breaststroke underwater. My doze wuz alwyz glogd, that kind of makes the “breath coordination” part a pain in the… nose.
And to tell you the whole story, I’d figured the breaststroke on my own by falling off the deep end of an otherwise-empty Olympic-sized pool, but only once I’d thought to myself “ok, if you’re going to die in such a moronic way at least have some dignity about it, stop wiggling!” - as soon as I did, I floated from the bottom back to the surface.
Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning. IIRC, she sewed rocks in her pockets and waded into a pond.
James M. Barrie’s ward, Michael Llewelyn-Davies (one of a family of boys who inspired JMB to write Peter Pan), died by drowning clutching another young man, who also perished. It was probably a double suicide.
