Male to female suicide ratio by country
Male to female suicide ratio by country
If you're having trouble understanding what this map means, it means that the suicide rate for men is higher than for women everywhere, notably 5 to 6 times higher in Eastern Europe and Russia, and 8 times higher in a couple of Central American countries and West Africa.
I wonder what makes men the world over decide that suicide is the best option.
I would imagine toxic masculinity.
Men are encouraged to be stoic and not express their emotions.
Most men don't have a single friend they can talk openly about their emotions with.
They are also told their entire lives that everyone relies on them and then are publicly shamed if they fail. Plus being first in line for any violent conflict, where they might lose the few friends they have and no outlets since showing any weakness is punished.
It's interesting how terms like toxic masculinity lead to instant downvotes from a certain type of person but if you make the exact same comment without it you get zero downvotes.
It's almost like people have been conditioned to be reflexively averse to specific words without actually understanding what they mean.
Not just that. In 90% of suicide attempt, the decision was made within an hour before the attempt. Impulsivity is a component and men are more impulsive. We also see that people with ADHD are more likely to attempt suicide too. Not only that, women who take the pill are 2x more likely to attempt suicide and 3x more likely to succeed. This is because estrogens stimulate the frontal lobe and are needed for emotional stability and cognitive control. Which is also why girls outperform boys on average in academic settings as well.
This means the difference isn't just a social issue. Suicide rates have been increasing for both men and women in the western world the past 20 years. Thankfilly, that doesn't mean we can't improve it.
But we can't expect it to ever be 50/50. Unless ofcourse we make women's lives worse. But that's not solving men's problems.
I wonder what makes men the world over decide that suicide is the best option.
Because if you don't have a partner and high paying job, you aren't just worthless, you are a burden.
Men are overly hormonal. Domestic abuse, war, homicide.... They should take a more logical stance instead of being a slave to their feelings.
Women actually attempt suicide more. Men just die from it more. This is mostly because men tend to use firearms and women tend to use poisoning/overdose (not necessarily narcotics)
We are not as good at voicing our issues with a committed support network and we are way better at following through on suicidal ideation.
Shit life syndrome
I wonder if evolution isn't at play. Females killing themselves off is an awful reproductive strategy. Males doing the same is not such a big deal.
If I'm not clear: A woman takes about a year from attempting to get pregnant to gestation to birth to recovery. I could impregnate hundreds of women in a year. And so could any other man. We're simply not as valuable.
And yes, men have plenty of value outside sperm donation, I was trying to shine a harsh light.
You're right. Estrogens play an important role in brain development. They stimulate a few regions in the brain, which include parts of the limbic system and the frontal lobe. Both playing a huge role in emotional stability and impulse control.
Now what we see in both primates and humans, is that when males get frustrated, they will seek out a weaker opponent to unleash it on. This usually is a juvenile or their mother. Females are weaker, and don't have many targets to terrorize. They absolutely would if they could. So estrogens play a role in self control.
Women inherited this benefit. The emotional and cognitive control that estrogens enhance, is why women are less impulsive, have lower expression of aggression and perform much better in schools. This is because estrogens stimulate brain development in girls and it gives them an advantage over boys.
We also found that men with normal testosterone levels have this effect too. In pretty much all animals where we studied this, higher levels of testosterone correlate with higher levels of aggression. Not only that, in both humans and rats, t-levels fluctuated based on social hierarchy. Changing as status changes. This may have to do with self preservation and making sure you don't piss off a stronger opponent.
But in humans, slightly higher levels of testosterone correlate with less aggressive behaviours. This is because when men and women produce more androgens, they produce more estrogens. And so the self-control for men increases.
Furthermore. Women who take the contraceptive pill are twice more likely to attempt suicide and 3 times more likely to succeed than women who don't take the pill. This is why estrogens are added to prevent depression. A well known side effect of the pill.
Thank you for explaining it.
I wonder what makes men the world over decide that suicide is the best option.
No one cares, and life is cruel and cold. The end.
I have no way to know the lived experience of women, but I have observed since about 4 years of age that the buck stops with me. I, and I suspect the vast majority of men, have no backstop - If I have any problem that I can't fix myself, or can't pay money to get assistance with, I am fucked.
I hear anecdotally that women are more likely to tell people about suicidal ideation... Does this imply that women have better results using social networks to move past the stressors or illness behind that ideation?
Best case if I was feeling like I couldn't bear to keep living and told someone, maybe a family member would have me committed for my own good. Then after the imprisonment, I am also unemployed and still have no one with the bandwidth to help me deal with whatever issues I was having.
Afaik suicide attempt rates are 2-3x more common in women than men. Men are just more likely to choose methods that are more deadly.
Not to belittle it on either side but I do wonder what causes that disparity. Is it that men plan it more thoroughly or have access to more dangerous methods? Do women choose methods that, unintentional or not, can be backed out of more easily? Are women more likely to report a failed attempt than men? If that 2-3x factor is true, then why don't we see similar numbers of idk completion? I hesitate to say success because it is very much not a success to commit suicide, there are always other options, even if they're not perfect.
I have observed since about 4 years of age that the buck stops with me. I, and I suspect the vast majority of men, have no backstop - If I have any problem that I can't fix myself, or can't pay money to get assistance with, I am fucked.
I think this is an important observation. Women, almost always, have some avenue of potential support, even if it's unsavory. Men very often have nothing.
This is confusing as shit
Why? The red and orange are close in color, otherwise it shows if it is green in color, more women commit suicide than men, then the ratio goes up by color
Are you colorblind?
I'm a man, USA. In my personal experience, which doesn't mean very much, I've noticed that men seem unable to accept catastrophy. They try to reason or wiggle a way out of it. Woman seem more at ease when dealing with horrible events.
If I had to guess, it is a difference in perception and experience. Perhaps men are groomed to be "providers, problem solvers," and so they despair at unsolvable problems, while women are told not to "overreact," and to "support" others in times of crisis. Like a weird inverted effect of patriarchal society.
Men are groomed to hide feelings. We are often told from very young age don't be a sissy. Suck it up. Be a man. From young age you are thought that showing emotion makes you less of a man, makes you a sub-human. But we all have issues, pent up emotions and problems. Then one day you simply stop wanting things. Or pain becomes too much.
Ever cry in front of a woman? She will never be attracted to you ever again.
Expanding on this it could be that women deal with catastrophe (e.g. SA/rape) much earlier in life so later catastrophes are perceived as imminently survivable.
Women are also often taught to expect unfairness.
It would be interesting to find a way to also represent the overall rate. Some of these countries really stand out for their high male:female ratio even though their overall rates are not particularly high.
Total numbers aren't relevant for ratios unless the numbers are low enough that the ratio swings wildly from year to year.
Yeah, data could be skewed for countries with very low populations. That could be why Greenland is left out, despite data being available from the wikipedia page that the data is taken from.
Wasn't paying attention and misread the map at first. It's showing male suicides / female suicides. So a green nation would be 1:1 equal suicide by gender. So every nation has a strong bias towards male suicide, some much more so than others.
So the data suggests we should promote women's suicides more /s
Is it all attempted suicides or successful suicides only?
A suicide rate means successful, just like a murder rate is successful murders and not attempted murder.
Thank you for clarifying
Successful. Women actually attempt suicide more, but more often choose drug overdoses rather than immediately fatal means.
Women actually attempt suicide more
Is that on a unique persona basis or does a person with a failed attempt skew the numbers with a second?
Considering various social taboos around suicide, I'm not sure how reliable such data is.
Could you elaborate on what angle you're coming from? It's a trend on worldwide scale, social taboos can hardly be a reason for much inaccuracy.
I'm not talking about the general trend of more men committing suicide than women. I just think that the specific ratios for different countries might not be that accurate.
Green is such a beautiful, bright, shiny color... unmissable you might even say. I see it nowhere except the legend though. :-(
There's nowhere on earth where women are as good at killing themselves as men are.
Yaayyyyy... we did it.....
So, while there's no green, I think it'd be interesting to consider what's going on in the yellow places. Its likely those areas are close to parity even if male suicide is (marginally?) higher.
Particularly India and China.
Edit: just India, China is on the higher end after looking into the actual numbers. Also, Grenada should show up as green on this map, but the creator chose to not include it. Admittedly, it wasn't the only lesser Antilles island that was nixed so I'm not going to immediately call bias.
Hello,
Didn't we all move to [email protected] ?
I didn’t know about that community, but I also don’t see why I shouldn’t post here? The beauty of the Fediverse is that there can be many places that serve the same purpose.
So why is higher make suicide green?
Pretty sure green would be male/female suicide parity (for every man to commit suicide, there would be a woman as well). I'm pretty sure the scale indicates more men than women commit suicide the further up you go. That being said, it is not a very good graph, and also doesn't show total numbers, which would be interesting to see.
For every female suicide, zero males commit suicide! Hooray! /s
In Greenland there was 1 polar bear attack per female suicide.
In Greenland there was 1 polar bear attack per female suicide.
I choose that this infers someone’s lover killed themselves after they died from a polar bear.
Look at all that "privilege".
Two things can be true. Privilege does not guarantee happiness or satisfaction in life.
As a cis-het-white male I have basically every mainstream privilege, as a result I've lived most of my life completely unaware of the discrimination many others face on a daily basis. When "SJW" first became a term I considered myself anti-SJW. I was depressed and struggling in life and being told I had advantages over other people was not something I wanted to hear. Since then my understanding of what privilege is and means has changed a lot.
Having privilege does not have to be a scary thing and you are not a worse person because you have privilege. It's simply a fact of life. We intrinsically understand that attractive and/or talented people have advantages in life and get treated better based on traits that are purely biological, those traits do not guarantee those people happy or even productive lives. Take that knowledge and apply it to race/gender/sexuality and you understand privilege.