Development of My Initial Idea

I'm thinking to find a solution to encourage more suicidal people to ask for help from professional counselling organisations. I came out a question, as a counselling organisation, how to promote its service from passive to active, I mean how to find out will-be clients (suicidal people) actively instead of waiting someone who wants to gain helps come to ask passively.

There are two points can be developed, one is from the angel of suicidal people--- influential design which might be change suicidal people's mind and push them to ask professional helps instead of solving problems by themselves until they commit suicide.

The other point is the counselling itself. Design a method or a service which might help professional counselors to find out who is suicidal or who need help.

Integrate my initial idea (increase suicidal people's fear of death and get rid of any would-be suicide equipments) and these two new ideas together, I developed an idea which is to build up a systematic service system for counselling organisations.

Suicide people would like to choose a way which quick and less painful to kill themselves, and what they are afraid is failed suicide, because if they alive from a failed suicide, their living condition will be more miserable than before, for they suffered the pain and might be will suffer disable or other sequela in the rest of life. So if I design a information on/in most popular suicide tools and suicide places to tell suicidal people how terrible if they kill themselves by using such tools/methods and show the failed suicide figures/percentage which caused by using such equipment, and the results after a failed suicide, as well as illustrations/photos which show the scary picture after a suicide/failed suicide, then people might be hesitate to use the tool/methods which they think is perfect for suicide before, so they might be give up (such as the way of coal gas) or seek to other ways to commit suicide, but as same as the former one, such information is on other tools as well. So at this moment suicidal people might be hesitate to kill themselves because they don't want to suffer greater psychological and physical pains if they fail to die, even it just happened in a very few cases, but they don't want take the risk.

Meanwhile, the helping line number and website address is also on the equipments and the billboard, in order to give people chance to ask for help immediate when they hesitate, desperate and confused. If possible (I mean if this idea is accessible) the councelling organization will arrange a couple of well-trained professionals in the hotspots such as bridge, cliff, the top of architectures, shelves in shop/supermarket/pharmacy which selling would-be suicide tools/equipments to seek and observe who is suicidal and talk to them actively in order to persuade suicidal people to accept the professional guide and therapy.

Evidences of my idea (examples of failed suicide afterwards):

"Experts believe that for every suicide there may be up to 100 failed attempts. However, people who have survived a suicide attempt will not necessarily walk away unharmed. One of the biggest problems is with tylenol/paracetamol. More than 50 per cent of young women who attempt suicide do so by taking an overdose of these painkillers. They often do not know that the drug takes four hours to be absorbed by their body.

If they get to hospital quickly, doctors may make them eat a mix of gooey black charcoal to remove the poison. Unlike in the movies, stomach pumping, in which a hose is forced into the stomach and the contents sucked out, is rare. Not only painful, it can also cause death through stomach acid getting into the lungs.

If the overdose took place much more than four hours before, patients are hooked up to an intravenous drip for 32 hours, to help flush out the poison. They will later need specialist treatment. Tylenol/paracetamol is toxic to the liver so they may even need a liver transplant.

Without enough transplant organs to go around, a suicide attempter may be less likely to get one than a person with liver disease. This means a certain number of people will die within a month of taking the overdose.

Another less common problem is permanent paralysis - loss of the ability to move or feel. Thins can happen to people who have survived jumping from tall buildings or deliberately crashing cars. Some people have even survived after shooting themselves in the head. They usually have brain damage, or partial paralysis like someone who has suffered a stroke. Their faces are usually disfigured or destroyed."
(Claire Wallerstien, 2004, pp. 34-35)

Bibiolography

Claire Wallerstien, (2004) Need to Know Teenage Suicide. United Kingdom: Roger Coote Publish