Active methods of suicide include hanging, shooting and jumping, methods that tend to be swift and effective and allow little scope for interruption or time to reconsider. Passive methods include overdose, gassing and drowning, methods which are less overtly violent and which may allow scope for intervention, or time to reconsider.

The most commonly used method in suicide attempts is self-poisoning, by both men and women. There has been an enormous rise in the use of paracetamol over the past 20 years and it is now the most common drug, involved in nearly half of all adolescent overdoses and 70 per cent of overdoses by children.

Paracetamol overdoses are particularly dangerous in the sense that they are frequently not immediately fatal, and people can believe that they have suffered no ill-effects, but it can cause severe long-term liver damage.

In the 1960s overdose and gassing accounted for 75 per cent of female suicides and 50 per cent of male suicides. Today half of female suicides are a result of overdose compared with 25 per cent of male suicides.

Men are more likely to gas themselves, either by domestic supplies or by car exhaust fumes, with 50 per cent choosing one of these methods. There has been a 339 per cent rise in the number of men hanging themselves, compared with a 191 per cent increase in women.

Drowning has decreased by about 30 per cent for both sexes. The replacement of barbiturates as sedatives by the less toxic benzodiazepines is partly responsible for the 36 per cent fall in female suicide deaths in the 20 years to 1995, although the number of non-fatal overdoses increased.

Increases in hangings and other suicide methods were found to pre-date the decline in overdose suicides. "This suggests that the social or other problems that underlie recent rises in male suicide rates may also affect women but are not mirrored by increases in suicide rates because the method they favour has become less lethal," David Gunnell reports in The Lancet. [53]

Self-poisoning is a more common method of suicide used by men and women in health care professions than in the population as a whole, partly due to the fact that they may have more ready access to prescription drugs.

Firearms are a common method of suicide for male farmers, accounting for 38 per cent of farming suicide deaths. Again, farmers often have easy access to firearms.

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