This chart looks very much like the one on an older suicide website, Lost All Hope. The site's founder last updated his blog in August 2018, and the methodology links (I believe) no longer work, but the link to the chart does. Here's what the site's founder had to say about his chart: "For information on the most lethal methods of suicide, a good starting point is the statistics on the number of successful suicides by method (see
Suicide statistics). There is also a much published study from 1995
1, where 291 lay persons and 10 forensic pathologists rated the lethality, time, and agony for 28 methods of suicide for 4,117 cases of completed suicide in Los Angeles County in the period 1988-1991.
They were asked to rate each method as follows:
- Lethality: How likely is the method to cause death (where 0% is no chance, and 100% is absolute certainty)
- Time: An opinion on the length of time the method will require to produce death
- Agony: The amount of pain and discomfort you would expect from the use of the particular method (ranked on scale of 0 to 100 where 0 is no pain/discomfort and 100 is the most pain/discomfort possible)
The outcome of the study is presented below, ranked by order of lethality from just the pathologists who participated in the study (the lay persons tended to drastically overestimate the lethality of methods).
Anyone reading this table to identify a suitable method of suicide is advised to read carefully the information on the dangers of the suicide methods mentioned on this site, and visit the section
Help me, because statistically you are much more likely to hurt yourself by attempting suicide than to succeed killing yourself (see
Suicide statistics for more information)."