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The rate of attempted suicide is largely equal, it's just that men are more successful at it. I don't believe it's the smoking gun you think it is. Proof: http

• watwut 7y ago
  Men are more likely to shoot themselves or use other violent method. That is more effective and makes it harder to save the person then trying to poison yourself and such (female choice).
  • kick 7y ago
    Correct!
• scarmig 7y ago
  It's not random, though, that men choose different methods for attempting suicide than women. This isn't merely about access to guns--people in countries with few gun suicides also show a substantial gendered difference in success rate. And if women account for 3/4 of suicide attempts, but men account for 3/4 of completed suicides, that means that men are choosing methods that are almost 10x deadlier than women, which does demand explanation. One theory is that things we code as suicide attempts are instead acts of self-harm intended to act as a cry for help instead of a genuine attempts to end your life. In which case, if women do have stronger social support networks that would respond to these cries for help, you'd expect exactly that kind of weird imbalance and difference in success rates. I believe this accounts for part of the difference. Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly. If the average man attempts suicide once before succeeding, and the average woman attempts suicide three times before succeeding, even assuming equal propensities to suicide women will show up in the statistics as attempting it three times as often as men.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    > This isn't merely about access to guns--people in countries with few gun suicides also show a substantial gendered difference in success rate. There are countries where women die by suicide more often than men. You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer. > Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly. This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
    • scarmig 7y ago
      > There are countries where women die by suicide more often than men. Agreed. We might take the fact that more women die by suicide than men in those countries to say that women are relatively worse off than men in those countries than women are to men in countries where the ratio is reversed. > You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer. Agreed, but it's unclear which direction this would push the numbers: more men die by drug overdose than do women, though I can't find a breakdown by gender of prescription drug overdose. And plenty of other methods can also be miscoded, e.g. intentional car crashes, which are one of men's preferred methods. The only ones that I'd expect to be coded correctly most of the time are exsanguination and hanging. But we've got to do the best we can with the numbers we have, and try to improve accuracy while we're at it. > This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't. Correction noted. A previous attempt at death by suicide is a significant risk factor for future attempts at suicide, with somewhere between a third and a half of deaths by suicide being on a second-or-more attempt, but my "likely" was incorrect. It also seems like reattempts aren't likely to account for the gendered divergence in attempts versus deaths, because the large majority of first attempts at suicide don't result in future attempts.