Discover Cartographic Marvels and Navigate New Worlds!
Rules
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.
It's just a poor term overall. To a lot of people it sounds like masculinity itself was toxic and bad, instead of pointing to a toxic form of it.
Should just have a better, less confusing word for it.
Toxic masculinity was a term coined by men wanting to be free from the expectations of the patriarchy. It's beyond heart breaking that so many men parodoxically react with anger to this phrase. Double so while bemoaning the lack of mental health options for men.
My good dudes, you're literally building the cages for yourself.
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.
Hey now, you can have both of those things and still be a burden.
Hierarchy, military conflict, and expected economic outlook. All three are pretty bleak in the worst regions shown. External powers have the first, the countries in question are engaged in the later, and the next 20-50 years are pretty bleak for typical male occupations for the countries in question. I would expect Argentina to rise over the next few years, but who knows women may kill themselves at a higher rate under a fascist govt.
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.
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.
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've heard the claims that women generally opt for less effective methods because they're more likely to want to leave an opportunity to back out, or try to avoid leaving a messy corpse. I have not data here, these are simply claims I've heard.
I've heard the latter, as in even in death women are thinking about others.
Anecdotally, I've heard that almost universally. Every woman or girl I know who has chosen not to commit suicide, someone having to find their corpse factored highly in their reasons.
In part the reasons are perpetrated by media and culture. If you go back to the medieval period records men and women died at about the same rate and they both used predominantly drowning and hanging as method.
Think about the dramatization of suicide for a hot minute and poison shows up as having this stigma of being a woman's weapon or the "easy way out" more often than not the dramatic gut punch for men has been stuff like a gun to the head, hanging, jumping off a tall something... Something violent and effective and "brave" for lack of a better term. Certain types of death are coded as "emasculating" and those types of death are generally easier to rescue someone from because of the length of time between making the decision and actual death.
The deaths of women (at least provided they are not villians) in media are more often played up for gore and empathy when they are violently murdered but played down when it comes to suicide. Either the type used is quiet and gives the illusion of the peaceful end of quiet despair, it happens off screen or the camera angle changes to soften the impact. There is no comparative "unwomanly" way to die. This is in part because at some level it hits different. Executioners in women's prisons have reported that it effected them way more and caused mental traumas. People who make fiction use this to manipulate the way you're supposed to feel.
At some level with enough iteration you create expectations of what suicides are supposed to look like based on their individual thematic meanings... Which are coded by gender.
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
If it is green then they have the same average right? 1:1. But in this graph it would be difficult to show when more women committed suicide, which might nowhere be the case.
Or you'd get 0.5 with a color match, for example.
Women literally never commit suicide at the same rate or less, that's kind of the point.
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.
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.
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.
Low numbers could also mean that the tracking/reporting in that country isn't very good and therefore the data isn't reliable.
In some cultures suicide has a very negative stigma attached to it, which can result in suicide deaths being reported with other causes.
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.
Considering various social taboos around suicide, I'm not sure how reliable such data is.
Green is such a beautiful, bright, shiny color... unmissable you might even say. I see it nowhere except the legend though. :-(
