http://wizardchan.org/v9k/res/68522.html
Threads like this really bother me. First and foremost because of the Wizardchan culture of actively encouraging suicide as a solution to one's problems. I mean, I'm not going to say that suicide is
never an answer - like, I believe that terminal patients with no hope of recovery should have the right to choose assisted suicide instead of enduring a long and painful road to an inevitable death - but, like, suicide is one of the few choices that you can never go back on. If it turns out you made the wrong choice, that's it, you're dead, you can't change your mind. And Wizards shouldn't see it as a viable option, because if they just tried
working with people they'd be able to turn their lives around! It will be hard, and I know how much of an insurmountable feat it can seem like to seek help from other people when you have crippling social anxiety, but it's not impossible.
But the other reason these threads bother me is the whole idea of helium (or nitrogen or whatever) asphyxiation. My mom is a chemist. She works as an instructor at a college chemistry lab. And in the time she's worked there there has been at least one accidental death of an employee via nitrogen asphyxiation, and at least one close call with a student (the one instance I can think of off-hand, a student was found passed out in a sealed room, miraculously before death or even any brain damage could occur).
That shit freaks me out. And just the process of it - these gases are colorless and odorless, so you can't detect them that way, and they'd make you feel lightheaded but they'd hinder your brain processes so you wouldn't be able to make the connection with that lightheadedness and realize, "oh shit, there's a gas leak or something and I need to get out of here," and then you'd just pass out and die with no hope of helping yourself. I mean, I concede that it would be a wonderfully effective method of suicide, but shit the idea of that sort of thing happening accidentally is
scary. And it's
real.
One of many reasons I don't actively browse Wizardchan very often at all.
(Though I will say this about the thread I linked - it is pretty admirable, if that's the right word, for the OP not to want to put those he leaves behind through the uncertainty of what happened and why.)
