As an MP officer, I responded to a couple hangings. They all displayed having second thoughts after it was too late. In Korea, one (Korean) contract security guard at one of our compounds hung himself on from a metal bar between the guard shack and the compound wall. You could see his boot marks where he obviously tried (repeatedly and unsuccessfully) to scamper up and take his body weight off the ligature.
I don’t buy for a second it was a suicide. Hanging isn’t a suicide method of choice for women. At least with Marilyn Monroe, they gave her a bunch of drugs and tried to make it look like suicide. They’re getting sloppy.
Wasn’t there some study not too long ago which interviewed folks who survived suicide attempts by jumping off tall bridges, and they all reported having the same thoughts the very split-second their hands left the railing... that no matter the depths of despair nor the commitment to offing themselves, their thoughts at that very moment were of tremendous “what the hell am I doing” regret?
Solzhenitsyn wrote about the difficulty of hanging himself while in the Gulag through slow strangulation. It’s pretty much impossible to stop yourself from resisting it.