According to this study from 2004, these are the hanging survival rates depending on how long you were hanging for:
- 0-5 minutes: 100%
- 5-10 minutes: 57%
- 10-30 minutes: 36%
- >30 minutes: 0%
Obviously it's better to have longer than 30 minutes alone just to be safe, but your odds of ending up a vegetable are very low if you hang for at least 30 minutes.
yes 30mins of hanging is a long time and 99% deadly, but when it comes to suicide, we want to have a big safety margin. This is why 2-4g of SN is deadly but people consume 20g (or 40g if two cups).
If she is alone 30min, I imagine she will not hang for 30min. Probably she has to attach rope, hesistate for a little bit, maybe pray and just there 5-10min are gone. Then maybe she calculated someone will come in 30min, but he comes in 25. Another 5min gone. And instead of hanging for 30, she could hang for 15min.
When being a vegetable is at stake, every minute and every percent counts. Even books like The Final Exit by Derek Humphry advice having long enough time alone, not only for death to occur, but also have first death signs on the body (like cold skin, livor mortis) - so that even untrained person would know there is no point of resuscitation and the person is 100% dead.
