Women attempt suicide more than men, but men are more likely to succeed. The primary reason for this is the difference in the methods used. Men tend to use typically masculine methods of committing suicide, such as hanging or guns, while women tend to use typically feminine methods of committing suicide, such as poisoning or slitting wrists.
The most obvious explanation for this discrepency is that men have more access to guns. However, in countries such as England in which no one has access to guns, the discrepency between male and female suicide rates still exists; men merely switch to a different very fatal method (hanging).
Some people theorize that women are more likely to have attention-seeking suicides. I find this explanation unsatisfying for two reasons. First, I haven’t heard an explanation of why women are more likely to have attention-seeking suicides, which creates the same problem, except back a level. If anything, you’d think the lack of social support for men with depression would make them more likely to attempt suicide as a last resort to get someone to pay attention. Second, in my personal experience with suicide, even when I firmly intended to kill myself I still automatically thought of wrist-slitting and to a lesser degree poisoning as “how you do it”, whereas my suicidal male friends tended towards hanging or guns as a method.
So I have to admit defeat and open it up to the commentariat. Why do men commit suicide more than women? What accounts for the difference in methods? Do women tend to have more attention-seeking suicides and, if so, why?
Thank you for your lovely compliment. 🙂 And *hugs* if you want them.
Hey, (more than) a little late to this discussion, but its a really interesting and personally relevant topic for me so I can’t help myself. I’m a male (straight, cis) with Bipolar Disorder. I’ve made in my life what I consider a suicide attempt on three occasions – as in taking sustained actions toward carrying out a suicidal plan, as opposed to simple ideation. However, these attempts were never going to be non-lethal – as the method in every case was jumping off a cliff. I was over the safety rail and maybe half a meter from the edge the… Read more »
I just want to add another wrinkle here: based on my work with suicidal people (admittedly, quite long ago), there is a staggering level of ignorance about the effectiveness of pills and wrist-slitting among those who lean towards their methods. My subjective impression is that most women who go for these methods actually believe they will do the trick. They are shocked to learn that it’s virtually impossible to kill oneself by slitting one’s wrists, unless you cut really long and deep — an exercise which is tough, gruesome and painful; and that even most prescription-strength pills these days will… Read more »
I have had 5 very close personal friends attempt suicide, 3 of them were successful. Here’s how it broke down: the three who actually died told no one of their plans, used fatal methods and were all men. The two others who attempted suicide made a “big deal about it” and used pitifully-ineffective methods (a dozen asprin – REALLY?) – they were also all women. I completely admit that men CAN warn their friends and relatives and use ineffective methods. I also admit women CAN warn no one and use effective methods – but my personal experience has not shown… Read more »
@ PM
“2. Lifetime Exposure to Violence or Death”
Exactly how many times will a suicidal man have watched a character of his sex killed with absolutely no consequences and complete indifference from the author/audience in his lifetime?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenAreTheExpendableGender
I wonder if anyone will ever do a tally.
I hope you are OK, Cripdyke! Here’s what Dr. Thomas Joiner has to say about suicide – the 3 main factors present are 1. Social Isolation, 2. Lifetime Exposure to Violence or Death, and 3. Perception of Burdensomeness. I think that 1 and 3 are true for men more than women (in the US, anyway). 1, because men are more likely to be depressed after a divorce, are less likely to maintain social circles, and put less emphasis on the family. 3 I believe is also true, because men are supposed to be the bread earners and, if they are… Read more »
My response is anecdotal, but I hope interesting. I am a transsexual woman with major depression. During depressive episodes, I do engage in suicidal ideation – thinking about how & where & when I would kill myself, if I were to choose to do so. The only time guns ever factored into my ideation was immediately after a good friend shot himself to death. Even then, I barely thought about it before I was turned off by the whole concept of guns existing at all. My brain then went on to spend time ruminating on methods that predominantly involved cutting,… Read more »
If we could get more women to successfully commit suicide and less to unsuccessfully commit suicide (so the numbers were identical to men’s numbers), would that be an improvement over the current situation for women? Or would it make things worse?
abyssobenthonic makes a really good point about the greater acceptance of male death, particularly violent death. Closely related to that, in addition to “society’s apparent preference for its martyrs to be male,” there’s also society’s preference for its violently defeated, punished, and destroyed villains to be male. Many people who would be quite enthusiastic at the prospect of a man being killed, injured, or made to physically suffer for his wrongdoing get squeamish about the same thing happening to a woman guilty of the same offense. (Or often even a greater one; I’ve known plenty of people who would say… Read more »
one question I was always vague on was why suicides slit their wrists rather then their throats. Slitting your own throat, assuming you know some basic anatomy, will leave you dead in seconds: finding the veins in your wrists is much harder, and they’re smaller.But that might be just my martial arts training talking. Hm….Another possible reason for the difference: I don’t know about the US but in Israel the martial arts are definitely studied more by men, which means men are more likely to know the body’s vulnerable points and when they decide to suicide, act on them.
Going by the CDCs numbers, the discrepancies in death rates due to methodology can be accounted for in the US at least by firearms vs poisoning This is not actually true according to the source you posted. The article says that “Almost four times as many males as females die by suicide,” whereas even if we look only at poisoning, the percentage of female suicides through poisoning is only about three times as much the male percentage. Therefore, there are still more male suicides by poisoning than female suicides. In fact this can be seen directly in the statistics. If… Read more »
From the National Institute of Mental Health “Suicide is not a normal response to stress. It is however, a sign of extreme distress, not a harmless bid for attention.” [emphasis in original] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-america/suicide-in-america-frequently-asked-questions.shtml Going by the CDCs numbers, the discrepancies in death rates due to methodology can be accounted for in the US at least by firearms vs poisoning (men and women use suffocation methods like hanging at similar rates) Firearms: men 56% 30%, Suffocation men 24% women 21 % Poisoning 13% 40%. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml There are a number of theories in the scientific arena, including the following, none of which… Read more »
I read an article about that ages before: So, Murphy says at least 200,000 women are involved in suicide attempts annually. But he points out that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one’s life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances. “An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It’s most often an effort to bring someone’s attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself,” he says. In… Read more »
Mixed thoughts: First, I agree with f. that it’s sort of a cultural meme. And I also agrre with TheAverageOutlier that failure is regarded by society as non-masculine, and surviving a suicide attempt would be regarded as the ultimate failure by some, hence more dedication and/or careful planning. Second, people have access to guns even in european countries where the arms regulation seems stricter on the surface. In most countries, men are still required or expected to do military service, and in most rural areas there’s alot of hunters etc. But even lacking access to guns, i think that men… Read more »
Going back to the list of depressive symptoms which may be more common in men… being high-energy, irritable, aggressive, etc. may simply lend itself better to creating a rock solid plan for suicide.
I also think that typically male and typically female suicide methods might be a sort of cultural meme. If you’ve seen a bunch of movies where a dead woman is found with slit wrists or an empty pill bottle, or a man is found hanged or he shoots himself in the head, it only makes sense that your suicidal ideation would follow that pattern too.
I tend to think men shy away from less than sure suicide methods because they fear the “surviving a suicide attempt” shame. You’re a pussy, you’re less of a man, you’re a failure who can’t even kill himself right. I think this is the prevailing thought pattern. I think surviving a suicide attempt is more socially acceptable for women than it is for men. Of course, many women do succeed and many women use extremely effective methods. And not all poisons are alike. I could name some not so hard-to-get substances (or combinations of substances) that provide a quick and… Read more »
I think it has something to do with depressed men having a stronger need to take control, get angry, and act out, which I think has something to do with the reasons why men get depressed more than with men themselves. Hence, women would be more likely to commit suicide if they had life experiences more similar to men. Consider Rural China, where women’s suicide is higher than men’s… if you read about some of the women who did it there, some of the common elements are this: the women are expected to work to support their families, they stand… Read more »
A lot of suicides seem to be the result of a man viewing himself as a failure (a consequence of the whole Success Object thing?) and a failure who successfully kills himself was at least successful at something, ergo more of a man than a failure who tries to kill himself and fails. Related to this is society’s apparent preference for its martyrs to be male. Not having women in combat roles is perhaps the most overt expression of that preference. Is there any more respected death in a warrior culture than that of the soldier who jumps on a… Read more »
If anything, you’d think the lack of social support for men with depression would make them more likely to attempt suicide as a last resort to get someone to pay attention. I would think, in that state of mind and with all the social/cultural baggage, that a suicidal man doesn’t expect his suicide to bring him any attention. : I wonder if men are perhaps more private about their suicides, as well… pick less public places. My elderly neighbor that committed suicide went out into the boonies in his truck, sat there, and took all his medication at once. It… Read more »
If anything, you’d think the lack of social support for men with depression would make them more likely to attempt suicide as a last resort to get someone to pay attention. And this is where the script of being a man chimes in to remind us men that we don’t need that support because we are men but to feel the need for attention is failure in and of itself. Based on that once all other options are exhausted its time to end it. But I think you may be taking a wrong turn earlier on in your post here.… Read more »
I don’t think the mindset with attention-seeking suicides is “Oh boy, I want some people to pay attention to me, I’ll pretend to try to kill myself”. My admittedly rudimentary understanding is that these people, who are again mostly women, *think* they really do want to commit suicide, but their lingering uncertainty leads to these nonfatal methods, like pills and cutting. Men are no less susceptible to depression IMO, but since unlike women are not encouraged to indulge their emotions, most depressive thoughts are fairly successfully suppressed as unmanly. Thus, and at this point I’m basically guessing, those men who… Read more »
“If anything, you’d think the lack of social support for men with depression would make them more likely to attempt suicide as a last resort to get someone to pay attention.” No, because men don’t “seek” attention. See that’s where it all goes down. Men kill themselves because they lack attention. Women try to kill themselves to seek attention… or at least that’s what the common ethos is. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying that’s the perspective I think people have. Anyways I think it’s because men are brought up to not dance around the issue. Got a… Read more »