I don't know who's claiming that regular drowning is "peaceful" but I'd take it with a massive grain of salt. Jumping into a river, while sounding fairly reliable depending on the current strength and speed and where you jump in (the further up the better so you wouldn't get to the slow water of the ocean?) sounds quite painful and distressful as @mg191 says. SI may come into play but you being in the situation you're in may not be able to save yourself. Almost certainly not the most peaceful of ways to go out though.
SWB on the other hand is a
very good way to go. and is a method I've been considering both two years ago when I initially joined and today. I won't ramble on about my situation and the challenges I personally face with this method, so I'll keep it focused about you and anyone else interested in the method.
You
could SWB in a river, and provided no one else is around it might reduce your chances of being saved, and being that you're in a river your chances of survival are also lower if SWB itself doesn't work. If peace is your priority however, I'd recommend finding another place to try. The conditions for method success are:
- You must have a method to pass out. If you can't do it above water, you won't be able to do it in the water either.
- Protip: hyperventilation isn't required for this method. Any means of making yourself pass out will work. However, exercise caution - this is a guess, but I assume the reason you're not waking up underwater upon the dive once you pass out in is because there is no longer enough available oxygen for the brain to support consciousness. If you attempt something like playing the choking game underwater which only temporarily blocks this bloodflow,, you're likely to wake up again, possibly underwater and having to experience actual drowning. Furthermore, hyperventilation is probably one of the best methods of passing out for SWB, as it actively depletes your brain and once you're gone under you only have a 2 to E minute window before brain death occurs. This won't occur with most methods of fainting.
- Your body must have a low buoyancy. Otherwise, you're gonna need some weights to tie around yourself to ensure you don't float back up. However, if your body isn't buoyant by nature, this will have the bonus of looking like an accident, provided no one finds out about your plans and no one's suspicious now, and you're known to go swimming somewhat frequently, and you don't write a suicide note. It will look far more suspicious with weights, depending on how obvious they are and what you were doing at the time. This way, at least if you are """saved""", you might not end up in a psych ward.
- Your chosen body of water must be of a sufficient size. This one's a little more lax, however there is the possibility that if attempted in something the size a bathtub, you may convulse after fainting and your head may turn to the side, which may result in one becoming a vegetable. If there are means to secure your body in such a small place to prevent this from happening, by all means go for it. Again, this may erase your ability to make it look like an accident, but that's icing on the cake for most and is certainly not a requirement for this method. With your example, a river may suffice, but with SWB the peacefulness may get impacted if you were to rise above once more due to currents and such, and could also have a chance of leaving you vegetative.
- Your chosen body of water must be fairly private. If you choose to pass out via hyperventilation, you do only have a 2 to E minute timeframe to be saved, so you might be able to get away with a public pool or body of water with no lifeguards and that is infrequently visited. However, this is somewhat of a gamble. Depending on where you live you may be able to find a lake or an ocean comfortably warm enough to do this in also, to retain peacefulness - not an option for me living in Canada!
- A note on this, the person who originally posted this here attempted in a lake and also lived i n Canada like me, he actually lived in a city fairly close to mine coincidentally enough, but the cold water shock was just too much to overcome and it was too hard to stay under the water that long - he'd dye of hypothermia before anything. Due to the cold water concern, my best bet is a hotel pool, but living with my parents I'd have to wait till we took another trip again. This might not be an option because of COVID, I don't know if hotel pools have opened up again yet especially due to the disease transmitting via water droplets, and IDK how effective chlorine is against COVID as well. You'd have to do some research on that one. A story from me about this - I recall a time where my parents were out and left me at the hotel pool. There wasn't a person around. It would have been so easy to do SWB then, but I wasn't suicidal at that time......
