“Russian roulette” suicide attempts

Since writing about a recent possible suicide attempt by a graduate student in a university chemistry lab using the chemical sodium azide (see my last post, “Accidental ingestion?”), I’ve been asked about different types of suicide attempts and specifically whether, if it was a suicide attempt (and we still don’t know), the person probably truly wanted to die. Generally, suicide attempts fall into one of two categories: 1) serious attempts, in which the person really wants to die, or 2) “cries for help,” in which the person doesn’t really want to die but wants others to know how badly he/she is hurting inside (more bluntly-put, to get attention).

That dichotomy came up in this recent possible suicide case because, on one hand, if the person is knowledgeable about sodium azide and really wanted to die, one might think that a larger dose would’ve been used (the person was hospitalized in critical condition, but recovered fairly quickly with treatment), but, on the other hand, if the person didn’t really want to die, one might think that a smaller dose would’ve been used (the person obviously ingested enough to come very close to death, very well may have died had any more time elapsed before someone else arrived on the scene, and there’s no indication as of yet that anyone was tipped off beforehand). In other words, for someone who really wanted to die and presumably knew a lot about the substance in question, it seems unusual that the dose ingested was too small to be lethal, but by the same token, for someone who really didn’t want to die and knew a lot about the substance in question, it seems unusual that the dose ingested was large enough to come so close to being lethal. Keeping in mind that we don’t even know yet whether this was in fact a suicide attempt, I think it still illustrates that there’s at least a third kind of suicide attempt, what I’ve termed a “Russian roulette” attempt, in which the person is indifferent as to life and death and decides to essentially let “fate” make the decision, e.g. to ingest enough sodium azide to be lethal if enough time passes before help arrives and then either never wake up or wake up in the hospital (as the person about whom I recently wrote thankfully did). If — and this is a big “if” — what happened in this case was a “Russian roulette” suicide attempt, my hope for the person involved is that there will at least be the perception now that “fate” intervened in favor of life and that the likelihood of a repeat attempt will therefore be reduced.