In my circle of friends, there was a similar tragic case: Someone suicidal took deadly poison with delayed effect (5-10min), immediately regretted it and called one of my friends for help. (Sadly, the ambulance couldn't save him.)

The very pessimistic philosopher Emil Cioran (author of e.g. De l'inconvénient d'être né, "The Trouble With Being Born") who beside his suicidal thoughts died at age 84 once said in an interview, that suicidal thoughts are paradoxically the reason, why he stayed alive: The knowledge of the choice to end existence if the suffering is too much makes it possible to endure its insufferableness.

Maybe it is this choice, to live or not, that makes a lot things bearable? And it's much harder if this choice is gone for whatever reason, in one direction or another?

(my conjecture) It’s human nature: your animalian instinct to avoid death takes over once you’re actually facing it

yeah curiosity pushes us to do foolish things, here it's just a morbid context

I wouldn't say that curiosity is a common driver for suicide attempts, or did I misread what you're saying?

I was just trying to find a common, non sad, basis for doing things that will backfire.

Here are some more interviews with people who survived suicide.

https://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/releas...

In England suicide prevention is a Public Health duty, and public health is normally located within local authorities (a form of local government). So there are a variety of suicide prevention approaches across the country, but they should all be informed by the national suicide prevention strategy.

Kent and Medway felt one problem was with "male help seeking behaviour". They did a lot of work to understand what this actually means, then they released material that appealed to men. They avoid use of mental health language (eg, "depressed"), and they use the words that men use themselves "knackered", "stressed", "regret" etc.) https://www.kent.gov.uk/__data/assets/image/0005/95009/relea...

is this a literal example of survivorship bias?

Any traumatic experience will have an effect. Why is that at all strange?

Have you ever wanted to ask a girl out for weeks, months or years, only to realize you are completely incompatible once you get her? Life is like that, especially when you're younger :)

Maybe this is one problem that VR can solve. Virtually simulated suicides? Virtually simulated anything. You don't have to die or hurt yourself, try X in a safe simulation first to see if you really want to go through with it.

The virtual piece of it would ruin the last second regret. The regret comes from the realization that you've crossed through a door with no return.

Can't ever get that in VR unless somehow the subject does not realize it's fake.

Would it be ethical to subject someone to a virtual suicide they thought was real...in order to convince them to not attempt in the future? The technology seems to be getting to a place we could create such an experience, terrifying though it may be.

VR seems unnecessary. Just have a gun around with blank rounds.

At the range of direct contact to the head, the explosive force of a powder load is deadly whether or not there's a bullet along for the ride.

Good point. How about weakened blanks?

You'd think that once VR got to such an advanced state, we'd have already long before synthesized effective medications / electrical-magnetic therapies (e.g. shock therapy or TMS) to effectively treat depression enough that the VR suicide simulation would be pointless.

OTOH, the most effective treatments we have for depression are almost a century old, have tons of awful side effects, and were discovered by accident (i.e. MAOIs and electroconvulsive therapy), so I'm not too optimistic in the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries.

Suicidality does not imply depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116433/

Total Recall / P.K. Dick "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale".

That's like learning how to trade using paper money. It removes any threat of consequences and is ultimately not a very useful approximation of reality.

I see where you're coming from, and I think there's an interesting question here -- is the immediate regret a conscious, rational determination? Or is it a primal self-preservation instinct?

While video games and paper money can remove threat of consequences, VR is still extremely good at triggering ancient, subconscious brain pathways e.g. fear of heights. If regret from suicide is similar to fearing heights, then perhaps it would actually be useful?

No, this will increase death by suicide. We know that reading about suicide or watching fictional depictions increases risk.

VR marriage apps with faceapp induced aging.

Placebo pills?

I'd rather say that the urge to kill yourself is fundamentally irrational. Yes, there are relatively "rational" suicides, but these are very rare.

But it may take going to the edge to realize that you want to live and want to die at the same time. An irrational suicidal urge does not remove your survival instinct or will to live, it can only hide it, at best.

I believe that this conflict is at the center of many "strange" or counter intuitive behaviors around suicide.

>I'd rather say that the urge to kill yourself is fundamentally irrational.

How so? If there is little to no expected pleasure and considerable expected pain in the foreseeable future, why is it fundamentally more rational to wait it out or "fight" instead of giving up? Both seem rational choices to me even if I'd choose the former.

For one thing the basis of that decision is a warped perception, if not outright psychotic.

For another, a rational death wish can't really be reversed, especially not within minutes or hours, as seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

We tend to rationalize irrational drives or motivations. But that doesn't make them rational. Depressives can and will try to prove to others why they have to die. But the basis seems to be more a neurobiologic function than an objective evaluation of facts.