Suicide by chainsaw

[Jorms_McGander]

Yeah I know, you're gonna say that suicide by chainsaw is a ridiculous idea, and it's surely not as popular as some other less violent methods, but for some people it has been the path to mortal release and they have done so for a variety of reasons. So I'd like to just share some of those people. I don't have an academic license to access articles so I am restricted to abstracts, public facing articles, news articles, and whatever I can unlock with the extension available at unpaywall.org. If you see initials it's cuz the full name is in the source. By the way the indentations are my own words and I basically only did that because TIL that ctrl+] indents a whole paragraph.

So without further adieu let's go to Florida:

TM is an inmate in the Florida prison system with schizophrenia and a history of suicide attempts. He landed in the system because he pushed his truck into a lake, so he was arrested for littering over 500lbs. He had avoided his medication for approximately a week by the time of his suicide, and was obviously struggling and not receiving sufficient support within the system. One day on work duty he walked over to a chainsaw on the ground, pulled the cord a few times, stood up and pressed it to his own neck. It is hard to understand all symptoms of schizophrenia, but the anger and isolation at being misunderstood are universal human experiences and no doubt the reaction of his peers to him played a role in his choosing such a violent end.​

Source

And now let's take a trip to the academic ether

We will meet a 58 year old caucasian man in a case of what's called a complex suicide. You'll also encounter complex in other contexts like a complex trauma might involve elements of crushing and laceration in the same injury, and a complex suicide in this case involves elements of chainsaw and hanging. So to speak. This man's wife found him "hanging from the basement ceiling of the cellar in which he lived." He had moved down there a couple of years prior due to increasing reclusiveness. The article doesn't speak to his relationship with his wife--he was found three hours after death, which suggests that she was engaged in trying to care for him and holds some compassion, but I am speculating and that's as far as I will go. He was taking medication for depression and had previously attempted to OD using those plus alcohol, but it didn't work. There is a path of escalation in behaviour from socially isolating to attempts at nonviolent suicide to his successful suicide. This man's daily routine was to look after his garden in the morning, and then do some wood working in the afternoon. One morning he walked out into his garden, turned his chainsaw on and pressed it against his stomach. He stopped before complete disembowelment. I wonder if he knew that he successfully lacerated his intestines and had nearly disemboweled himself, but he stopped using the chainsaw at that point and went inside and hanged himself from a rafter. The fact that the study doesn't describe the rope as being blood soaked suggests it may have been placed there prior, as the location of other blood [garden, underneath corpse] is noted.
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Source [GRAPHIC]

Now we can travel over to academics publishing out of France

A 32 year old Asian woman who was an engineer. I can't get past the abstract for her so I don't know why she was suffering, but I do know she was determined and intelligent and she had a chainsaw. She built a structure out of wood about 1.5M tall with the chainsaw at the top resting on two blocks. There were pulleys, water bottles as counterweights, and elastics secured to the floor. This would control the movement of the chainsaw as it descended once cutting through the blocks upon which it rested. So one day, she lied down facing the floor underneath her homemade chainsaw-guillotine and pressed the power switch she had built for it. The chainsaw cut through its restraints and descended smoothly, cutting through her cervical vertebrae and spinal cord.
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Source

Now heading to the UK we'll meet DP

DP was the last man living in a flat determined by his council to be demolished. It is described as "repossessed" but it doesn't sound like DP had to do with that because he was the only tenant and had refused eleven offers of alternative living arrangements. This is a case of somebody who needs more support than he was being given--I can't find any information on what was driving him to be so attached to his living space. We can say though, that it wasn't an adaptive position for him to be in. Eventually the council went to court to get an injunction to force him to relocate and allow for whatever progress was slated to occur, and this was the last straw for DP. He tied his chainsaw to the leg of his pool table, rigged up a timer to activate the chainsaw, and laid down underneath it. He placed a piece of cardboard on his neck, the teeth of the saw on the cardboard, and then he turned on the timer and waited. I get the impression that DP did not feel listened to in his situation, his agency may have been eroded and ultimately he responded in one of the only ways he could think of, by inflicting upon himself an incredibly violent death. I can only wonder if there was a way to help him transition without driving him to that.
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The UK went through a process of "dude wtf" after 9 news agencies reported a whoooole bunch of detail, so I had to use two sources to assemble this story and one is not reliable but it preserves the details after the UK media smartened up and unpublished the deets. Source1 Source2

Now finally we'll take a trip to Serbia

With an academic article I can only access the abstract regarding, a 39 year old man was found dead in a meadow. A chainsaw was lying beside him, and his wounds were restricted to his head, neck and shoulder. He would have been right handed as his left carotid, jugular, and vagus nerve were all completely severed. He managed to cut into C5 and C6 vertebrae and sever his own spinal cord. There were striped lacerations on his left shoulder, so the blade sorta rested there as he did the cut. Finally, this man's job was as a lumberjack so I had to include him because he is the only lumberjack I found in the chainsaw suicides.
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Source

Well that's all I got for you. I hope you found this assembly of chainsaw suicides informative. If you get into some of the academic sources you can find a little more related reading, but then you're getting into band saws and circular saws and one 23 year old male who survived giving himself a chainsaw to the neck.

Have a nice day

 

[Ambivalent1]

my head is to the side because I cut it lol

 

[Linda]

I work a lot with chainsaws, of several different types, because there are many trees on my farm. I have no doubt that suicide by chainsaw is a possibility. I also have no doubt that it would be risky, and difficult to carry out effectively. There is a real risk that you would survive, but with serious injuries. The basic problem is that a chainsaw is not designed to be held and manipulated in the ways you would need to use it if you wanted to cut your head off. I have just done some simple tests with two of my saws (with the engine off, of course). With the smaller saw, with a 25 cm bar, I could easily get it into position, but such a small saw might not do the job effectively. The larger saw with a 45 cm bar, is much heavier, and I found it almost impossible to position it stably where it could cut my head off.
Bottom line: I would suggest you look for a different method.

 

[escape_from_hell]

The one from France, the 32 year old Asian woman does not sound that awful, especially with good drugs and ear muffs.
Laying face down and having it hit the spinal cord first versus throat first would make a big difference I think.
But would still prefer to just build a guillotine to accomplish the same thing.

 

[Jorms_McGander]

I work a lot with chainsaws, of several different types, because there are many trees on my farm. I have no doubt that suicide by chainsaw is a possibility. I also have no doubt that it would be risky, and difficult to carry out effectively. There is a real risk that you would survive, but with serious injuries. The basic problem is that a chainsaw is not designed to be held and manipulated in the ways you would need to use it if you wanted to cut your head off. I have just done some simple tests with two of my saws (with the engine off, of course). With the smaller saw, with a 25 cm bar, I could easily get it into position, but such a small saw might not do the job effectively. The larger saw with a 45 cm bar, is much heavier, and I found it almost impossible to position it stably where it could cut my head off.
Bottom line: I would suggest you look for a different method.

I would only be able to accomplish it if I used either of the hands-free setups. One in which a timer turned the saw on and the individual lay beneath, and the other in which gravity brought the saw down a nicely engineered guillotine.

I wrote this up for something to do, cuz I just am curious to know forbidden stuff and so it was just a matter of finding all the chainsaw articles I've read before. Just a way for me to make something useful out of myself.

 

[Relic]

Full PubMed article:

 

[wanttodie]

Full PubMed article:

wow

 

[AlexYaBoy]

 

[Euthanza]

I wonder why people/govt didn't ban chainsaw like they did to Nembutal or SN