Well, other methods haven't worked, such as trying to help or have these discussions. Or relying on science.
> Safety for women is a facet of healthy men.
Unfortunately, men generally don't care about this reasoning.
> ...we should find ways to improve men's mental health.
Unfortunately, men are the ones generally opposed to this. It's a "sign of weakness."
Let's be clear, men work hard to prevent men from improving men's mental health.
I think the underlying idea is that us men need to hold ourselves accountable. These issues are primarily* issues that men need to fix, and it's unrealistic to expect other demographics to do it for us. Thus, telling men to "be better" is about the most you can expect from other demographics.
*There are nuances here, obviously. Please don't try and reply with some gotcha.
This is the most plausible hypothesis, judging revealed preferences by the outcomes.
It's not the most plausible hypothesis. Men are more likely to own firearms than women are, therefore they're more likely to attempt suicide by firearms.
hanging/strangulation (9,164, 49%);
self-poisoning (4,098, 22%);
jumping/multiple injuries (2,423, 13%).
All three are equally available to men and women and anyone else.
In terms of rate, male suicide rate 17.2 per 100,000. Female suicide rate of 5.4 per 100,000
London has the lowest overall rate of just 7.3 per 100,000, 65% of the national rate. North East being highest at 14 per 100k.
The highest population group being Males aged 50-54 years, being 27.9 per 100,000
Wales is even worse, with Males aged 45-49 years being 32.3 per 100,000, and overall 21.6 (male) // 7.5 (female)
Generally the worse the economic opportunities, the higher the rate. Middle aged men are most at risk, men in general are at high risk, and guns have nothing to do with it
The sex difference in completed suicides is nearly universally 3-to-1 to 4-to-1.
My mental model is that men tend to be more extreme and less conservative than women (risk-taking is more prevalent), and this leads to more extreme approaches in how they try to kill themselves.
But it's been a while since I've read any of these statistics, and I have no special credentials. Just thinking about what we're observing.
Try again.
It also may be down to what was available to them at the time. There’s a famous case study where a lot of women in the UK were dying by putting their heads in the oven and gassing themselves in the 1950s. The UK government changed the formulation of gas that was being piped to homes and the suicides stopped. If those women really were dead-set on suicide, they would have just chosen a different method.
What people who’ve never had extreme depression might not realize is that in those low moments it feels like you will always feel this way and it will never ever change. Then you wait an hour or so and the feeling passes. So a person may not feel suicidal 24 hours a day, only at specific moments. But in those low moments, the chances of suicide dramatically increase and as the UK case shows, accessibility to quick suicide methods makes a big difference.
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[1] Speaking as one who did some decades ago, as irritating as life is right now I'm glad I bucked the trend of any “men have a higher 'success' rate” stat.
[2] Sometimes my nerd side takes control and empathy takes a back seat.
It's like the difference between killing yourself drunk crashing your car into a pole vs winding up in a wheelchair because you crashed into everything of value on the street before hitting the same pole slower.
In the past we had large wars, harsh labor, that killed off men, but not today. There's roughly 5% males born than females. India and China have aborted 10s of millions of female babies. In the Western world, massive numbers of men (from low to high skilled) have move there. So here we are, men everywhere, roaming around grocery stores trying to talk to women, 70 to 80% of the population on dating apps are males, bars are filled with men. It's not a good time to be a low status man.
Men and women are far too picky compared to the past. That's why they die alone. It's that simple.
There's nothing wrong with this if it means you're happier than being stuck in a relationship you don't want, but you can't have it both ways.
Most people reading this know exactly who they'd be with if they just said yes to their options. Not liking your options is vastly different from having no options at all. Your options can change if you make the change within as well.
What does this mean? Just lower your standards and there's a woman out there for you?
It's been a long time since I was single, but I never felt like that. I worked at a job with a bunch of other men and didn't have a lot of social outlets that involved women. My candidate pool was close to zero. I eventually recognized this and found ways to broaden my pool, but it wasn't easy.
I'm only speculating that I think the past used to be (a lot) worse. Competition was higher across the board for significantly worse options across the board. So much of the modern era is defined by the desire for social change, but nobody seems to pause and think what that must mean regarding the perception of their options.
Also, dating apps are pointless. Go volunteer for a community organization or join a pickleball league. Don't force it.
An alarming number of my wife's female friends married chuds, or seem to only pursue chuds.
One of her friends is cheated on by almost every man she's dated. She also almost exclusively seems to date men who have been to prison
Obviously "not all women" but come on. Women date chuds all the time.
> Expressed another way, that would mean that 10% of all males surviving to adulthood would perish in combat.
> We’ll get back around to fertility rates later in the series but for how if we assume each woman in this society is having on average five live childbirths, a 2% chance of death at each stage adds up pretty quickly – a woman who gave birth five times with a 2% chance of dying each time has a total chance of dying at one stage or another of 9.607%, which as you will note is not far off from the chance of dying in a battle
I remember reading something about mental health in Iceland being much more even between men and women due to less perceived stigma and more equality, leading to men seeking help.
It's 26%women/19%men some mental health issue and 7%women/4%men serious mental health issue
It could just as much be the case that men are diagnosed at a lower rate because they seek out care less often (many studies point at this being true) or that men who do seek care are not diagnosed at as high of a rate despite having the same symptoms (men report higher rates of dissatisfaction with mental care, and other studies show gender bias in diagnosis - men get told to "man up" in so many words-, or men get misdiagnosed because symptoms for the same mental illness vary between men and women)
Eliding or obscuring the act of operationalization leads to reification - treating concepts like real tangible things. I wish reification was taken as seriously as our taboo of anthropomorphization. It happens way more, and sneakily smuggles in human values into the sciences. In some ways it's unavoidable, but being opaque about it and doing it without knowing is a sin.