Home -> How To -> Methods -> LTA Calculator

Lethality-Time-Agony Method Calculator

In [1], 10 forensic pathologists rated the lethality, time and agony for 28 methods of suicide. The pathologists were requested to rate the criteria using the following instructions:

Lethality: How likely is the method to cause death. Please express your opinion relative to the lethality of each method in terms of the percentage of time you feel the method is likely to cause death from 0% (no chance) to 100% (absolute certainty).
Time: The length of time the method will require to produce death. Please express your opinion relative to the time required in terms of the number of seconds, minutes, hours, or days.
Agony: The amount of pain and discomfort you would expect from the use of the particular method. Please express your opinion relative to agony on a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 equating to no pain or discomfort and 100 equating to the most pain and discomfort possible.

At the end of this page there is a table which contains the data obtained from[1] and which is used to implement this calculator. The suicide method "Overdose Rx drugs" refers to prescription drugs, and "Overdose non-Rx drugs" refers to drugs which can be obtained without prescription.

Note that in the table, higher Lethality is better, whereas higher Agony is worse. The Time is given in minutes. The formula which is used to evaluate each method is:

Evaluate = WL * Lethality + WT * (456 - Time)/4.56 + WA * (100 - Agony)

Note that Lethality and Time can be determined empirically, but data about Agony can be obtained only indirectly, so it is problematic to evaluate. In addition, it is difficult to separate between Time and Agony since the longer time it takes to die, the more time there is to suffer. Indeed the research found that the grades for these two criteria were highly correlated, therefore, it is not obvious that they truly reflect two independent criteria.

REFERENCES

[1] Clinton Ernest Rhyne and Donald I. Templer and Lillian G. Brown and Noel B. Peters, "Dimensions of Suicide: Perceptions of Lethality, Time and Agony", In Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 25(3), 1995.

Instructions

A JavaScript-enabled browser is required in order to use this application.

Fill in the weights for the criteria (Lethality, Time, and Agony) according to the importance you want to give them (higher weights indicate greater importance). The weights do not have to add up to 100 or any specific number. Press the "Calculate" button to obtain a list of methods, in descending order, according to how much they scored based on the weights. Higher scores are better.

The underlying computation is done by calculating the weighted average according to the given weights. To see the grades for a given criteria, enter 100 as the weight of that criteria, and enter 0 for the weight of the rest of the criteria. This can also be achieved by simply pressing the name of the criteria.

Pressing the "Sum=100%" button will recalculate the weights so the sum of all weights will add up to 100. You only need to use this if you want to compare the scores of methods under different weight distributions. This recalculation preserves the proportions between all weights. The "Equal" button sets all weights to 33.3 . The "Clear" button clears all weights.