I saw this movie too, and I can’t think of what it was to save my life (sorry :)). Could someone spoiler-tag the movie please?
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I couldn’t swim to save my life. Literally.
Essentially correct, and I’m surprised it took so long to be mentioned. It was also the method of attempted suicide (IIRC) of a character in The Hours.
You might want to check what the name of that character was.
Ah, yes. It’s been a while since I thought about the movie, and I’d forgotten how they interwove the different storylines. Thanks. 
Just speaking as someone who used to do a lot of underwater swimming, the urge to breathe is overwhelming. I can’t imagine anyone intentionally staying underwater, no matter how depressed or sad or upset they were. Of course, if you can’t swim, or you were weighted down, that would be another matter. Even then, you’d be desperately trying to get air, as you were dying.
Edited to add: it would be a terrible way to go.
I mentioned it in post 15.
That was my point really. If you don’t know how to swim then of course you will drown if you go out deep enough and can’t dog paddle your way back to shore, but could Michael Phelps drown himself if he wasn’t impaired and had nothing with him but his speedo? It sounds like it’s possible, although it would be very difficult to do.
IMO: only if he intentionally breathed in water. Which I’ve never tried to do, so I can’t say how hard it would be to do on purpose. But it seems to me the instinct to not breathe water is a pretty strong one. It would be pretty hard to overcome.
I’m the same, and I’ve actually been taught to swim. I can’t do it aerobicly in fresh water, so I don’t have to swim very far out to drown myself. One summer I got rather confident in my swimming abilities and thought I could swim out maybe a three minute swim to a little island. I got a third of the way there before realizing I didn’t have enough energy to get across, and I just managed to get back to shore before I had lost all my swimming energy. And this was at a time I was running 10-15 mile runs, so it wasn’t being in shape that was an issue. Obviously, it’s my technique, but nobody’s been able to figure it out. I can’t tread for more than like 60-90 seconds, either. Same problem. It was long enough to get an “A” in my swim class, but not useful enough in the wild.
Oh you’re right - she didn’t sew the rocks in. I guess I was thinking of the spurned lesbian in Possession.
My bad. But even 15 posts seems unusually long for it to take to be mentioned.
Anecdote time. My cousin’s second husband’s first wife did exactly that in the little lake on their property.
Assuming the OP saw the movie in a theater and not at home, it was probably
Saving Mr. Banks.
Well, the OP did specify intentional drowning when not weighted down by rocks or anything, so that incident didn’t fit.
The protagonist in Martin Eden commits suicide by drowning. The man swims as deep and as long as he can to make sure he’ll suffocate in case his survival instinct attempts to change his plans.
I guess the tumble of a fast-flowing river would do it but it sounds a bit random and potentially prolonged.
My grandfather’s aunt drowned herself deliberately, but I don’t know the gory details. I now can’t remember if “pond” is what I was told, or if I imagined that detail. I did always wonder how she did it - it seems like it would take a lot of willpower to override instinct.
A friend of mine told me once that if he was dying, he’d grab his scuba gear and go for a really deep dive, until he got narc’ed. Then he’d just enjoy the rest of the dive, until, well, he ran out of air and died.
All true, but it was maybe in the past 60 years that swimming lessons – of any sort – were universal in the US (Fredric Brown’s “Nightmare in Blue,” published in 1961, was based upon the idea that an adult might not know how to swim at all). Anything set at that time or earlier could be describing many adults of that time.