This is not something I think about much (fortunately), but what is the point in attempting suicide by means that are not likely to work? How do we measure "true attempts" vs "cries for help." I guess ultimately they are very close together... but all the same it seems harder to attempt and not succeed.

> cries for help.

This is the most plausible hypothesis, judging revealed preferences by the outcomes.

>This is the most plausible hypothesis

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.

How does that explain that this male vs female ratio stands in countries with low gun ownership rates?

Top suicide methods in my country:

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

Nonsense, that is an America-centric attempt at making up a narrative. The sex differences in suicide outcomes are essentially the same in countries with low to zero firearms ownership, eg Europe, Australia, Japan. If there are no firearms available, then other almost equally lethal methods are used (hanging, trains, etc).

The sex difference in completed suicides is nearly universally 3-to-1 to 4-to-1.

effect still remains after you look at statistics in countries with low firearm ownership

Even controlling for that the pattern holds.

I've been curious about the phenomenon of suicide for a while, so I've read quite a bit about it in different countries. One of the interesting things about suicide is the means of suicide is always whatever is most available or readily available in the environment. In the U.S. where guns are more available, about half of all gun deaths are suicides, and about 80% of those are men. But in some countries in Africa, men kill themselves more frequently as well, and the primary mechanism is by drinking pesticide.

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.

Gunshot suicides account for 2.5% of suicides in England and Wales [1].

Try again.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15834784/

Men are more aggressive so they choose more aggressive methods, which work better.

I think in general people are not educated on the likelihood of success per attempt method, which seems ok.

The person may not definitively want to die, but may wake up one day and not care either way, so attempting is a roll of the dice.

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.

Attention.

Yeah, because women tend to seek more clinical assistance than men do so of course the attempt % would be higher for them as well, because how are you even gonna know that number for men if they aren't even getting recorded.. the suicide numbers are the only actual real recordable evidence unfortunately.

Unfortunately a lot of attempts also end up in the ER, which is the main source of numbers here.

To ignore the terrible things going through the minds of people trying¹ and the effects attempts, especially successful ones, can have on others, for a moment²… I wonder if anyone has looked deeper into those two stats to, see if the attempt rate is actually the same but the lower success rate means that the average women in that sort of crisis position attempts more times.

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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.

Commonly proposed reasons I've seen mostly involve conscientiousness around impact on their body and setting. For the most stereotypical two methods: a gunshot to the head leaves a mess and means you're going to need a closed casket, while the mess from a slit wrist in a bathtub can be washed down the drain, and easily hidden while still having an open casket. But it's harder to "succeed" with a slit wrist in a bathtub, and it takes longer, giving more time to be found or to change your mind.