Women are 3 times more likely to attempt suicide.
For the longest time this factoid has bothered me, it’s usually stated anytime someone brings up that men commit suicide at much greater rate than women. The problem is (as usual for many feminist assertions) it’s most often not presented with any actual sources. This makes tracking down the facts time consuming and annoying. But after hearing this factoid one too many times I decided to go looking, this is what I found.
I decided to start my search at Wikipedia on the page about suicide gender differences[1] and lo and behold you get the factoid right there in the beginning.
Gender differences in suicide have been shown to be significant; there are highly asymmetric rates of attempted and completed suicide between males and females.[1] The gap, also called the gender paradox of suicidal behavior, can vary significantly between different countries.[2] Statistics indicate that males die much more often by means of suicide than do females; however, reported suicide attempts are 3 times more common among females than males.[3]
Following the foot note we get to the suicide statistics page[2] at www.suicide.org where we find what Wikipedia must be using as a source, as nothing else on the page deals with attempted suicide and women.
Note the significant difference in the rates between males and females – there are about 4 male deaths by suicide for each female death by suicide. But keep in mind that there are about 3 female attempts for every male attempt.
And
There are approximately 750,000 suicide attempts each year.
An estimated 5 million living Americans have attempted suicide.
More females attempt suicide than males.
(3 female attempts for each male attempt.)
Unfortunately there is very poor sourcing for the entire webpage with the only information being the following:
Data Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Going to the CDC suicide page[3] there are only two documents that deal with attempted suicide neither of which deal with year 2001 Suicide: At a Glance[4] and New Report: Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior[5]
The first only mentions the following that has to deal with female attempted suicide:
Females are more likely than males to have had suicidal thoughts.
The source for the above however references the report: Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior.
This report is rather thorough and does show females having a greater prevalence for attempting suicide, however, at no where near the rate claimed in the original factoid. The report found rates in the US (per 1000) were 0.4 for men and 0.5 for women, a ratio of 4:5.
A reported ratio not even reasonably close to a 1:3.
Obviously this wasn’t the factoid I was looking for. The only other method I could think of to find the 2001 data from the CDC website was to search for the following string on Google.
‘attempted suicide’ CDC 2001
After doing this search the only thing at the CDC that Google showed that had to deal with attempted suicide was a report on China.[6] Curiously the report itself doesn’t talk about male or female suicide attempts, what did was an editorial note attached to the report.
Similar to other countries, suicide attempts in China are
more common among women than men (6)…
Possibly there was our factoid again… But if so it was definitely in woozle territory now.
So after some hunting it seems this intrepid woozle hunter has indeed tracked down one of the grand woozles of the feminist herd.
Author’s Notes:
When I transferred this to AVFM I made a mistake in the original line and wrote “Women are 3 times more likely to commit suicide”. It was supposed to be “attempt suicide” this caused a great deal of confusion I sincerely apologize.
Also of note, the original Wikipedia article has been altered since my research. You can still find the original text by looking through the page history on the article at Wikipedia.
Sources:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
[2]http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/index.html
[4] http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet-a.PDF
[5] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6013a1.htm
[6] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm5322.pdf
