Sara and I would discuss the mechanics of various suicide methods obsessively. We debated whether you choke or break your neck in a hanging, whether it's better to die of respiratory depression, a heart attack, or liver damage from an overdose, or whether you could actually lie down in the snow and die of hypothermia or if you should take an overdose at the same time (that was questionable because the low temperature might make your heart slow down enough to halt the effects of the overdose). We read pharmacology books and package inserts of drugs to find out what happened from each kind of overdose. And being fully in the mindset of the suicidal person, unable to imagine that someone could not see things from our point of view, we wondered at the fact that the adverse event reports in summaries of clinical trials actually give the number of milligrams that each person who overdosed took and told what happened to them. Wouldn't everyone reading this information use it to plan their own OD? We didn't ever think of this information as a way to know how to save someone who overdosed: the reports were strictly how-tos. I remember being incredibly proud of myself when I thought up the combination of drug X and drug Y: drug X wouldn't kill you without drug Y because you'd throw up from it and get it out of your system. But drug Y was an effective anti-emetic, so on the combination you could keep the pills down. And an added benefit was that the drug Y was an anxiolytic, so you wouldn't be scared as you went. I wanted to rush out and tell people how clever my idea was, and then it hit me that the rest of the world didn't think of clever suicide methods as a constructive outlet for creativity... I used that combo in my first OD and one of my last thoughts before passing out was that it worked like a charm: my friends ordered me to throw up when they found out I had taken the pills, but drug Y worked so well that I couldn't throw up. I was so proud of myself! On the other hand, you needed to know what the means of death was in case you changed your mind at the last minute. That's why we memorized that Vitamin K is the antidote to rat poison and stored up antihypertensives to take if we ever took an amphetamine or tricyclic antidepressant which would provoke high blood pressure and then wanted to undo the effect. That just seemed like the kind of accident you had to prepare for; ODing was something that could just happen to you, like slipping on a banana peel and falling on your face. It paid to be prepared.