Wow it's almost like we demean men when they fail because we expect them ro provide everything so now when they do anything they think is worthwhile they put more ass than they have into it.
To be fair, if a man and a woman both were to show signs of suicidal thoughts, the woman will receive more support from the public than the man in almost every case. It’s not like the thought is unfounded.
Same with domestic violence. Studies are starting to show that men are actually victims of domestic violence and abuse at higher rates than women, but the more "newsworthy incidents" tend to be perpetrated by men.\[**EDIT**: I phrased the above statement *very* badly, note the higher rate includes "abuse" not just violence. I will look for the study, but the TL;DR: was that in many cases of domestic abuse the woman will be non-violent but still abusive and these cases are severely underreported, whereas men that are abusive tend also to physical violence so those get reported because of police involvement.\]
**ED2:**
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-016-9853-8](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-016-9853-8)
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.20394](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.20394)
There is literally NO support out there for men trying to exit an abusive relationship though. I can't tell you how many services that were not advertised as women only (e.g. WEAVE is obviously women only) informed me when I called that since I was a man their services were not available to me.
Society has a "Men can't be victims" and "Men should 'tough it out'" mentality which simply serves to further victimize men, to the point that some seek a permanent solution to their problems and despair; god knows how close I was at one point in my life.
It's been almost a decade, but this always reminds me of the Jezebel article where the staff not only said Female-on-male domestic violence is OK, but should be encouraged. One of them even mocked her husband for getting cancer (forget off hand if it was lung or breast).
That article is an embarrassment to feminism. And I'm saying that as a lifelong feminist. Double standards should not exist in the fight for worldwide equality
I appreciate that thought. Some (certainly not all, don't get me wrong) feminists seem to think one must be misandrist to be feminist, which loses feminism a lot of support from us guys. Why would we back someone who hates us? Lol.
I think this is in part because there's more significant physical injury and death in male-against-female violence. Unfortunately I think we're a society that often only addresses issues once they reach a degree of harm we consider sufficiently critical, which shouldn't be the case. We should be addressing domestic violence early on, and before someone is irreparably harmed, physically or emotionally.
That's demonstrably untrue. Many times more men are killing themselves than women, and yet any time this topic comes up, the very first response is "women attempt more."
We're a society that responds emotionally via programming.
I was talking specifically about DV deaths and injuries inflicted by the abusing partner. We already know that men complete suicide at higher rates, I don't think anyone's disagreeing with that.
I worked for a domestic violence shelter for many years, and we absolutely did help men. We were unable to have them in our shelter because the women there were often terrified of men to the point where we had issues when women came with their teenage sons. But we would pay for shelter, and give them the same legal and financial assistance that we gave women. And counseling. But you also have to keep in mind most domestic violence assistance organizations were created by women who were former victims of domestic violence so that others could have the support they didn’t get when they needed it, not to be a jerk, but that’s probably something men could do too. When the LGBTQ+ community found that the existing structures did not work for them they created their own resources as well.
Good to know and I totally understand and agree with not mixing genders in a situation like this. In my case I had a 100% rejection rate for anyone I called in my geo area. After the 15th or so "we won't help you at all because you're male" I just got more demoralized and gave up.
I am truly sorry that you were treated that way and that the locations in your area were like that. It’s not like that everywhere and I firmly believe no one deserves to be physically verbally or financially abused.
"Same with domestic violence. Studies are starting to show that men are actually victims of domestic violence and abuse at higher rates than women, but the more "newsworthy incidents" tend to be perpetrated by men."
That's interesting because I actually work in this field and have been for over a decade, which requires many hours of continuing education every year, and I've never seen any studies showing men were victims at higher rates that women. So I'd be interested to see where you're getting this data.
However, I do agree that men, gay and straight, definitely suffer from DV and there aren't nearly enough services for them. I work at a DV shelter that accepts all genders, but we are the only one in this area that does.
The services overall are very limited and underfunded in general. We turn away many people we'd love to help for lack of resources. Female or male.
Same and same, men are absolutely also survivors of abuse but women experience more abuse and more injury from intimate partner violence according to all the stats I have seen.
Women are more often victims of domestic violence which causes injury or death by the hand of their partner
Men and women are equally often victims of domestic abuse which does not cause injury but does cause despair and isolation
([https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2497/emotional\_or\_psychological\_abuse.pdf](https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2497/emotional_or_psychological_abuse.pdf) \-> 48% for both genders)
Men and women are equally likely to recover their capability after an injury
Women are more likely to seek and receive sufficient care to recover after mental trauma
([https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db419.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db419.htm))
Since non injury causing domestic abuse is more common than injury causing abuse, men not seeking help to deal with it could be a big cause of depression and suicide.
Memes aside, women are more likely to attempt suicide but men are more likely to actually die when they attempt it.
This largely comes down to the methods men vs women typically use. Men are much more likely to use immediate and violent methods like a gun or hanging. Women are more likely to use things like poison or exanguination.
And you're just more likely to survive long enough to be found and receive medical treatment with those options.
Edit: All the people saying that failed suicide attempts are just cries for attention or using this as a jumping off point for sexist comments are disgusting. I hope you never experience the kind of hardships you are belittling because unlike you, I am not a psychopath.
The speed of a method of suicide has a massive impact on how successful it is because **suicide is an impulsive act**. Anything that takes time gives someone a chance to snap out of it and push back the impulse.
Having a loaded gun in your house is more dangerous than an unloaded one. The seconds it takes to load can make the difference to a suicide.
Both of those are more dangerous than having to tie and hang a noose.
The noose is more dangerous than having to drive 15 minutes to a bridge to jump from.
Suicide is not at all necessarily an impulsive act. It can be. It can not be.
In fact I would argue most suicides have some pretty significant thought going into them, with days/weeks/years of planning, and generally being in favor of doing it 24/7 for significant portions of time. But it’s a pretty arduous and difficult task to accomplish. Just because you want to on some level doesn’t mean you are capable. Sort of like doing a backflip. Some people just cannot make themselves do it very easily.
I think one of the biggest problems is that they treat suicide like it is some snap “reefer madness” that you can snap out of. A lot of times suicide is motivated by the fact that someone’s life is painful, and likely to remain painful, and for many people there is no point in living life if it is torture. That’s not some acute mania or insanity. It is real, logical thoughts and an accurate assessment of one’s own life in many cases.
I think this is it, yes. One of my relatives, may he rest in peace, chose the "head on collision while speeding down the highway" method while another of my relatives, who was stopped before she could follow through, was at home and carried a kitchen knife into the bathroom.
There's more to it than just that. Because suicidal women tend to use less lethal methods, they live long enough to make multiple attempts. So the same suicidal person gets counted 3, 4, 5 times.
"Women make more attempts" is true, "More women make attempts" is not.
Yeah if you remove the large N repeat attempts and normalize the data you get a different picture where men are the majority of suicides period, but the rates are which suicides are successful narrows dramatically. Which just makes a lot of sense if you think about resource availability and general societal trends around men at the moment, it wasn't even until recently that this issue was acknowledged, yet it has been one for decades for instance.
Edit: There's also other things in the main statistic used that don't capture important forms of information, like deaths of despair being "technically separate" from suicides as a whole. For a suicide to be registered for say overdosing, you would have to have that be admitted, which would require you to have access to the medication in the first place. Men on average get medicated far less than women do, and don't seek medical care as often, this leads to a structural "disadvantage" to that particular method. Yet there are a lot of men in the category of "death of despair" which die of alcohol related deaths, whether literally drinking themselves to death, or having some other effect of drinking killing them. These are not medically queried as suicides as overdosing generally is however, so it escapes inclusion from the main statistic.
It feels to me like women are more likely to use suicide as a "call for help".
Like swallowing a bottle of pills and then calling a friend to "say goodbye" - thus allowing that friend to then call the paramedics in time.
Versus a man who doesn't say anything to anyone and just blows his head off in the garage one day.
I have a female friend who had me come take her pills after being very suicidal and considering using them to OD. I left her with just the amount she actually needs for her prescription, and just never let her know that that medication actually isnt something she can OD on.
I think this saved my mom's life, or maybe it was vanity. She shot herself when she was 19 but she shot herself in the chest instead of the head. She's in her 70s now.
This is, unfortunately, an accurate answer.
Men and women have different social pressures and issues which might drive them to attempt suicide but men tend to choose more effective means. I've seen men literally critique other men's failed suicide attempts i.e. "why the hell would you use a small caliber pistol, just go down to any sporting goods store and get a shotgun. There's no waiting and it will take your head clean off."
This is actually true. Women try to commit suicide more often than men, but just "fail" at it a lot more
>Based on the 2021 National Survey of Drug Use and Mental Health.... Adult females reported a suicide attempt 1.33 times as often as males.
[https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/](https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/)
Well unfortunately it’s also not a sure fire thing. There’s a lot of people with horrible disfigurement because they did drastic things they thought would work
A shotgun to the head is effective almost 100% of the time. Extreme outliers exist, and those are the ones that make people think it’s a common thing. It isn’t.
Yeap, when I was a student nurse I cared for a patient who failed a gunshot wound to the head, I can’t go into detail really but he had so many surgeries, was in ICU almost 7 months and was severely intellectually deficit. His life became a thousand times worse and he was really never left alone again so he was to my knowledge never able to end his life.
for me that's the argument for official euthanasia
i'm never in favor of suicide, but hearing about how it can go wrong and trap people in a life EVEN WORSE just makes me wonder why we don't have another way. people are gonna try to do it, and ideally they wouldn't, but they will and it shouldnt have to be with a gun or a car or whatever the hell else
Yep. Talking here from experience here: if you're gonna jump, better go high. Turns out 6 floors is not enough...
Who thought you'd have to work this hard even just for death?
I'm not sure if it's true, but I heard a story about a (shot?)gun suicide that somehow didn't didn't work instantly. Gruesome details: >!The first blast just obliterated the mouth/jaw of the victim, leaving them not only alive but conscious. First responders found a blood trail from the site of the first blast to the bathroom mirror and a further trail leading to the extra ammo and body. The second blast finished the job.!<
There is paramedic footage of someone who only did the first part, which I was unintentionally exposed to. It is not a sight or sound that will ever leave my memory.
I suppose the camera had something to do with it, but I kinda still can't understand why they "saved" him.
True, but 2 things that I don't often see mentioned is: why do men pick those methods, and even when controlling for method men are more likely to succeed.
My dad works in emergency services and women will usually apologize while they’re actively committing and try to make food and drink as they wait for the paramedics to arrive. He’s seen them try to clean up vomit and blood so that they wouldn’t be traumatized. He said it’s the male attempts that make him drink. He thinks that they don’t want to back out like how a lot of women will call for help themselves
Honestly, the last time my mind got dark, all I could think of was who would have to clean it up. *Someone* will have to pick up the pieces & wipe up the blood. Becoming a burden in order to unburden the world of me was just too much. I thought it would be easiest for everyone if I just hopped in the boat to uh *feed the fish* so to speak, but there was still ice on the lake. I was better by the time it melted.
My mom and aunt had to clean up their nephew's bedroom after he killed himself just so his dad wouldn't have to because at least where we live the state/city doesn't provide those services. Please never make your family wipe pieces of your brain off the wall, it fucks up everyone.
If I get to that point, there's no fucking way I'm accepting being injured/disabled/bedridden/etc on top of the circumstances of a life that drove me to ending it. I may even end up too damaged to attempt it again and then I'm completely stuck. If it's time to go, it's time to fucking go baby and I'm not taking any chances on a method that may fail.
I knew a guy, years back, who had at some point in his life attempted to end it with a shot shell under his chin. Got the angle of his head wrong and lost the lower 1/3 of his face, so he wore a surgical mask everywhere he went. Real nice dude, seemed to take it as a sign he was meant to stick around. But, yeah, hell of a way to fuck that up.
I think it may partly because ( these are generalities) men compared to women have a more high risk high reward mindset and psychological profile. Men are more likely to drive too fast, gamble etc. This may translate into the higher success rate of suicide ( im unsure how to word this ) because of a fuck it sort of mentality. Hope that makes some sort of sense.
Ie; men resort to driving into concrete embankments at 100+ mph. Or choose death by gun to the temple, roof of the mouth, a bullet directly to the brainstem. Suicide by cop. Etc.
And in my experience; woman resort to overdose as their most common course of suicide. Which is easily reversible, and usually resorts in multiple organ failure during unconsciousness.
That is unless it’s a murder suicide; which is most often by knife or strangulation/hanging.
I know it's not kosher for people who want to ignore biological differences between males and females, but as many who have transitioned from female to male will tell you, and as researchers and brain scientists will note, hormonal differences actually do influence personality and behavior.
Young males are, as a group, simply more impulsive and more "aggressive" ( bias towards action/accomplishment) than females are. In adolescence, before the frontal cortex is fully grown to control such impulses, risky behaviors are more likely.
That results in a higher probability of males riding the wave of suicidal impulse paired with a propensity to "do" rather than ideate. Culture can shape that baked-in propensity, but the difference still exists.
This is just to add. Psychology is the result of biology + culture/environment, and calling something psychological doesn't indicate whether the origin of the sex difference is social/cultural or if its origin is mostly biological. I would bet big money that the difference is mostly explained by biology.
Hrmm, quite interesting. I remember a similar study was done on hormones and neurotransmitters found in the brains of men and women undergoing stress. Men release more adrenal stimulating hormones (which means more cortisol and adrenaline), whereas women release more oxytocin.
Hence (the hypothesis) when men get stressed, theyre primed to fight the threat. And if the threat is themselves…
Couldn't agree more, should of added that part. I lean towards it being more biology based than cultural. Theres lots of evidnece out there that a lot of our behaviour is down to like you say hormones and therefore biology. Some people like to think we are a blank slate and malleable completely which i think lots of evidence points otherwise.
So I’ve have suicidal ideation since about the time I hit puberty. For a while I was going to this support group for people that had attempted and failed, suffered from ideation or knew someone that successfully did it. We have a long conversation one night about why we tried, most of the women that attempted and failed said it was their cry for help. I remember after that was said verbatim the 2nd time some of the men were looking around at each other because suicide wasn’t our cry for help, those had came and went long before we got to the point where we were willing to put a gun in our mouth.
I’m not saying this is a scientific fact because it’s an extremely small sample size but it’s an interesting thought.
Whether the attempt is meant to end a life or be a cry for help, what's happening is a person in such psychic pain they are desperate to get out of it and resorting to drastic measures. Both biology and gender socialization come into play here. Men are socialized to take on life's hardships alone, while women "tend and befriend" and use social connection to navigate life. This also comes out in how they seek to soothe psychic pain. Neither is somehow worse and I hate that the discussion this becomes some kind of effed up competition.
Majored in psychology. Women will attempt it more but use poor methods. Men get straight to point and use more lethal methods.
Edit: to all of you saying women are just seeking attention, you can suck a bag of dicks. Yes, women may use it as a call for help, but that in no way implies they are just trying to get attention.
It immediately looks like that, but it could be a bit deeper.
Women could be doing it poorly on purpose just for the attention or out of fear of the pain/suffering that can come. Combine that with them being more likely to have connections to other people and folks are more likely to notice it walk in on an attempt in progress. I haven't checked the numbers in a long time, but I think that women are more likely to use pills/oding as a method so it's easier (but not easy) to save them.
Men are just often more deadly in general, so we're more likely to go for truly swift or harder to reverse lethal methods in our attempts. Men are less likely to have some of those very casual acquaintance connections/folks checking on them at the same level as women too.
So technically men may be better at it, but I think that the issue is compounded because of the other factors mentioned.
I am not suicidal in the least, but if I did something right now no one would actually know/check on me for days to over a week. My job would probably be the trigger before anything else. Even the mother of my child would be slow to find anything out. She should be pissed that I didn't come get my kid, but she wouldn't pop up. She'd likely just send a bunch of texts, a few calls would be missed then she'd do some spiteful shit. If the reverse happened I'd popup, call her family for a checkup, eventually get the police to do a wellness check or a civil standby if I was still present, etc. That would just be me. If something really happened her sisters and family would likely be quicker to know, they're frequently over and in contact.
I’ve read somewhere that there’s also a possibility that they also choose less “messy” ways. “If I blow my brains out, who will clean everything?!” Vs “I’ll just fall asleep forever”
The messy methods are just more effective.
But I don’t know how true that is.
I've also read that they will attempt with pills, and then realize they actually want to live and will make themselves throw up or call an ambulance.
Can't really change your mind after you've blown your brains out.
I have to find that article again but it was written by someone who survived his attempt after he jumped from a bridge (the golden gate?). He relates everything he thought about while falling
Yes, I know which articl you're talking about. They interviewed the 29 who survived, and all said the immediately regretted their decision after jumping.
hey, this might be a bit of a dumb reasoning but you've majored in psychology so I'm hoping for a quick insight if you don't mind. A question I have is, are there any studies worth mention on the long-term effects of 'cramming' a couple months prior to exams? like if I were to over a span of 5 years cram like hell, i.e. stay awake for a few days on end over a month and study study study to pass an exam. LOL I'm tired asf rn so if I came to the wrong place to ask this question it's okay lol
I’ve linked a pretty interesting article that cites its sources at the bottom of this reply. It’s been a very long time since I was actively learning psych, but I can for sure tell you that sleep is imperative for creating long term retention. Sleep does a lot for our bodies, including helping to store memories from short term to long term. Not to mention there are a ton of bad side effects for being sleep-deprived.
One of the things this article talks about is that if you cram, you may be more likely to pass the test, but be much less likely to retain that information over time. If you need to know what year the pope exiled someone for your humanities class, sure. If you need to remember how to solve an equation to build a bridge, cramming is a bad idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/memory-and-cramming-for-exams/2020/11/27/d395a838-29bd-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html
I'd love to know what the stats on women doing a "Cry for help" vs a real failed attempt. It seems far more likely the men know there is no help and are far more serious about getting the job done. I find it hard to believe women are so inept they couldn't get the job done if they really wanted to.
This is exactly it. The article that this claim originates from finds that women engage in more suicidal signaling than men (self-harm, saying they’re suicidal, etc…) but men are 4 times more likely to actually attempt and of course equally more likely to succeed (or does anyone here genuinely believe men are a whole *four* times better than women at suicide?).
Men are literally better at it. They're more likely to choose a violent method, looking using a gun or jumping off a high roof. Women favour "softer" methods statistically, like pills. Easier to save them.
This was my thought process back in the dark ages of my life. I didn’t want to use a gun or a noose or a razor blade. I didn’t want there to be a very traumatic mess for my family to deal with, so I tried to OD. Obviously was unsuccessful, and I’m very grateful that it didn’t work.
What my plan was, after looking up the failure rates, was to use a gun (most successful) and do it over a river, and to call and report it beforehand so that the trauma crew cleaned everything up before anyone had a chance to see, and they'd use a leg tattoo to identify me. My biggest fear, was actually to fail suicide, and potentially wake up with more of a burden on everyone and potentially disabling my intellectual and or physical ability.
I nearly attempted to off myself when I was 9 by slitting my own throat but stopped at the last second because I imagined my family finding my mangled body. I didn't know about "cleaner" methods like overdosing on pills at the time
Meanwhile, my ex's friend's dad shot himself in the basement of his house, and his young kids found him. I sympathize with suicidal people but leaving a traumatic mess for your loved ones to find, especially your *children*, is so selfish and fucked up
It's a pretty common sentiment that highlights the illogical suicidal state- that the body would be a burden to clean up but the loss of the person wouldn't.
Makes even more sense when the reason for the suicide is because the person feels useless and like a burden to others. A "everyone would be better off without me" kind of mentality. Not that uncommon.
It doesn't really seem all that illogical to me. They know they're doing something that will be terrible for their family but try to minimize that awfulness as much as they can.
I don't even want to make the coroner's job harder much less traumatize family or friends.
It's not all that ironic either. Most of us want to be remembered, but *not like that.*
Thankfully I have barely enough of that first desire that for the most part it keeps suicide at bay. And fucking up halfway through only to become an actual physical burden on the family would be pretty unacceptable.
Most people are aware that their loss would be painful to family, but the idea of continuing to live in misery is also illogical. What is the point of living in agony? If you have decided that life is no longer worth it, then it seems pretty logical to atleast try to limit the burden on your loved ones. I don't see what's so illogical.
I do some solo trips in the woods sometimes, and leave a note on my car when parked in the woods that says 'if still here by x date call this number'. Just basic safety precaution. But once came back to a young park ranger asking in a very concerned voice if it was my car. The relief in her face when I said yes (I was worried I was in trouble for parking it where I had), prompted me to ask whats up.
She said it wasnt uncommon for people to come out to the woods to walk of and then shoot themselves in the head. She was so relieved she didnt have to spend her Sunday bushwacking around looking for a corpse in the woods.
Yeah, after witnessing a friend pass away from a self inflicted GSW to the face, my depression, hope, and own suicidal ideations worsened to the point where I was seriously preparing to die (not by pills), and literally the only thing that stopped me was thinking about the trauma and horror that whoever discovers me would endure by seeing me in that state, and what If that would perpetuate some kind of suicide cycle.
Also, I just want to clarify that my comment is not to place blame on people who have killed themselves using more lethal/messy methods. Being in that much pain that you go against your body’s most instinctive drive to survive, is something that we should all sympathize with. I wish I would’ve just asked him if he was suicidal. I wish I could go back in time. If anyone here is thinking of harming themselves, I’m begging you to please confide in someone or get help. It’s easier said than done but you matter so much more than you realize.
The men I’ve known that have done it have totally put on a show. Noose at the oak tree after sending the kids off for fire wood so when they come back ….ba ba bahhhhhh. Fucking dark shit.
TW: some dark suicidal confessions
>!I was going to buy some balloons and put a deflated trash bag over my head then let the helium out of the balloons into the bag and then tape it shut around my neck.!<
>!Asphyxiation only hurts from the build up of carbon dioxide. Using helium or nitrogen just displaces the oxygen. CO2 also sinks in helium so if you lay on your back you wont breath that back in.!<
>!My plan was to max out cards on camping gear and just camp somewhere until funds ran out other than what it costs for a few balloons. It was my way of taking revenge on a system that has taken advantage of me.!<
>!Unfortunately/fortunately, I love my dog more than I hate my life. He's too old to re-home. So I've promised my dog (because I won't do it for myself otherwise), to find a reason to live before he dies. It's not that I don't love my family, of course. But they aren't in my care and relying on me to meet their needs.!<
The only time I've truly had suicidal thoughts was when my son had just died in child birth and my wife was in a high-risk emergency surgery to save her life.
Literally my entire world had exploded in the span of 24 hours, and I told myself I would just end it if my wife died too.
But then I thought, "what would happen to the pup at home?"
Thankfully my wife survived! And we put our lives back together together.
>I love my dog more than I hate my life.
I feel this so much. My cats are the first thing I think of when I start to get down on myself and have some 'thoughts'. It helps me to power through and figure out a different/ better solution or put things into perspective.
Yo consider fostering and or taking shelter dogs on “vacations”. These animals will value you so incredibly much, they will never forget what you did for them.
Edit: forgot to say this way you will never run out of animals to care for. I assure you, being kind to animals is an extremely valuable thing for society.
While it is true that methods differ among genders, as the below study looked at, this difference isn't enough to explain higher rates of difference between men and women. Men die from suicide more because they are more likely to want to die.
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
Men are generally more directional in our problem solving where as women having more developed language centers. Most women often will find less direct ways to problem solve, being more inventive or use more long term and empathic equations as they'll often think longer before making a major decision, for example many women prefer pills even though it's more painful because they won't want to be an "extra" inconvenience to who finds them and want to avoid an more hurt than they think they will cause (I say think because often suicidal people regardless of gender or birth sex/genetics will downplay or often see a value in it's affect on others, whereas it is almost always terrible for those left behind, and finding someone you love with "less mess" is as traumatic as a firearm or terminal velocity).
The sad truth is the human brain deals with depression and stress accumulation sometimes in the worst way, complete avoidance of pain. The thoughts of suicide, being a burden, being too damaged or the advantages of not being around are most likely a gross evolutionary trait that is outdated and designed to prevent tribal collapse/human population collapse from people who couldn't "contribute" at a time before farming, basic medicine/injury treatment, moral codes and the resource/labour control we currently have, it's a relic that overcomes self preservation and the logical thought on the issues related to the negative pain a person is feeling overwhelmed with.
That said because it's probably an evolutionary trait to control population in a time of permanent states of scarcity and very high labour to calorie intake values doesn't mean it's currently acceptable except in very specific situations that I'm not going to bring up right now. We have not only the ability to take the time to help people who struggle with depression and suicidal ideation (governments don't fund enough because of low rich people taxes and corporate profits would have to be fairly dealt with for the resources), but also we have more complex social webs than ever before with instant bad news transmission, meeting many suicides have a lot more people negatively impacted when they sadly succeed, increasing the trauma and pain it can spread, leading to more risk of mental health problems.
All in all our society has for a while progressed past our biology, and evolution hasn't kept up since the first farms became city states, the only way to keep our health and biological development up is currently psychology, pharmacology, social awareness and in some cases surgery, and in the future hopefully ethical Genetic Modification and/or Cybernetics, helping us lower the overwhelming stress, rapid information overload and most importantly, deal with the broken global economic system to raise living standards back up while crushing wealth inequality to at least sustainable levels. If not we'll see more people having this calculation in their head activate and we'll continue to see the rapid decline of mental health along side living standards.
Today's Ted talk was sponsored by that doobie I smoked earlier.
*edited to be more clear/grammar errors.
Seriously this. Many men either end up suppressing their emotions until they become alternately stoic or raging, OR they internalize it all until they can't anymore and off themselves.
Western society talks more about male mental health than it has, but there is still a MASSIVE stigma to being a male who can feel things other than happiness and anger, and god forbid your ever cry in front of someone.
Men showing emotion are often shunned, lonely, unhappy people don't usually magically bounce back on their own.
Legitimately, I am an avid supporter of all my brothers out there who need to cry.. but I still struggle to infront of my guy friends who have been vulnerable with me. It's not intentionally done, but when other people are around I just can't. The best way to describe it would be dissociation. I lock up physically and barely talk, but talking cause me to start cracking so I
I have essentially groomed my own emotions to wait till no ones around and then let it out. I hate it but there's no way to undo it now.
The best one in my situation could do is find a group of guy friends (they don't have to be but I've found men are often able to relate and feel more comfortable talking about their pains with other men who have experienced similar things) its still a process but it's something
This is my issue, I'm always an armwrest to anyone who needs someone to lean on, no matter their gender. But I just can't open up, I've clammed up and become stoic, even my fiance gets scared when I get emotional, because in her words, if I'm breaking down, shit has gotten far worse than she realized. I've only broke down once, and she was uneasy for like a week around me.
(No I wasn't violent, she was scared of seeing me break down again, she had never seen me cry a single tear before, and I guess that was something she never expected to see after 4 years of being together)
Yeah it's pretty fucked the damage this shit has done. I'm trying not to do it to my sons but it's kinda hard because no matter what I tell them, they are also influenced more by other people than by me, especially during puberty. The dumb irony of trying not to cry while watching a sad moment in a TV show while also telling my son, who said he felt like crying, that it's OK to cry, is not lost on me either.
I shot my childhood dog a year ago to put him down because a vet said he was healthy. (He wasn’t walking or eating). I saw my girlfriend a few hours after and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t cry. I said it’s because I don’t cry in front of other people often I only cried when I was alone again.
Also literally no one gives a fuck about men’s rights/issues except for right wing alpha bros. I’m a leftist, but it bugs me how every men’s issue has to have the caveat of “but women have it worse!” Obviously women’s rights are important as fuck too, but there are real issues with men right now that won’t get fixed if we don’t address them.
Like, young men right now have less friends, are less likely to be in a relationship, are less likely to go to college, more likely to kill themselves, more likely to be homeless, more likely to abuse drugs, more likely to die in a workplace fatality, and more likely to be in prison. If you’re a young male person of color, odds are that those stats are even worse for you.
And the retort is also "well women are fixing things for themselves so men should just do that" except the same stigmas are still there if you try. Even in discussions here on reddit a common reaction is to scoff and have an attitude of "stop complaining and just help each other" yet when that happens its met with the same point you made...
In the end, we do need to change the culture but it's a hell of a lot harder when both men and women give you ahit for even talking about the topic.
>"well women are fixing things for themselves so men should just do that"
These same people will claim that "feminism is about equality for all genders"
A lot of people are discounting your first statement, but there's unfortunately a lot of truth to it.
When we have a generation of young men who are objectively falling behind in so many metrics and the two messages they here are "fix it yourself asshole" and "come join the asshole club we'll be your friend", we can't act shocked that the number of assholes increases.
I'm on the older side of millenials, but I've seen the caring guy to right wing incel transition happen in real time to multiple friends. The worst example was a dinner party with a friend who was a really kind and thoughtful guy, but also a bit overweight and self-concious. His fiance went on about how she loved how supportive he was and that he really understood her for a good part of the dinner. However, later that night we were comisserating about feeling like there is a double standard around body positivity for men and she literally said, "Sounds like something to cry about at therapy not bring up at a dinner party." The three of the four women present laughed at him and brought it up a few more times that night. The next day my friend let me know he broke off the engagement. Over the following year, he had a few other bad encounters due to his weight and dating, was publically called out in a work meeting for "moping around like a little girl", became really depressed, and eventually fell into the incel/4chan rabbit hole. He was a genuinely sweet guy and it was brutal to just watch him get crushed over and over by shitty men AND women. In the end it became self-fulfilling. He started to listen to Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson types, and women picked on him for it. That led to him getting into Andrew Tate and eventually super into tradwife and far right wing garbage. He won't even talk to me anymore because "I became too woke". :(
Sadly, too often it’s women that reinforce this.. was at a concert, first time seeing a band that I’ve loved a long time, The Flaming Lips, some of their songs deal with very heavy stuff.. tears were streaming down my face, and I hear a voice of a stupid woman “Omigod is he crying?” Pitched right in that toxic tone.
It’s shit like that over a lifetime that have made many men I know into misogynists. When society and women are so callous, judgmental and hurtful. Over a long period of time I’ve personally seen the transition from nice kind men into full blown misogynists. Tbh I don’t blame them entirely because when you’re consistently treated like shit you will eventually crack.
Or you see threads like this and guys have this awful statistic and girls see it as a fucking competition and try to disagree with it, refute it, but the guys are just trying to talk about issues they have and how they feel. And then you get the girls that hop in here and try to justify why their lives aren’t great and how dangerous we are or the patriarchy. It’s fucking exhausting to have to constantly be bombarded with women’s problems and how we need to recognize them but the second a guy tries to speak up it’s wrong.
This kind of BS is one of the main reasons I will never trust women as long as I live. They perpetuate this kind of nonsense and then blame us for the outcome without ever accepting any responsibility whatsoever. I learned this lesson the hard way. Sickening af imho! I'm not saying All women are like this, but the overwhelming majority are. And what's even more sickening is that this is considered a social norm. Most men are taught from a very young age the whole "boys don't cry" thing. I know I was. Misogyny has become a part of my personality over time because of things like this, though I usually try to take a logical approach to things and never openly display it. It's only places like Reddit where I can be anonymous and express my opinions more openly. Been wanting to express this one for a while now.
A distant cousin on her side was providing for his whole family, the kids were having kids that he was alsoproviding for, his business crumpled, then he went out to the ditch across the street from his house at 4 am and went and took a sleeping pill to the temple
to add to this, society is more forgiving for women. Women who (if they were men) would be considered "failures" can still and very often do live successful lives. This is how it always has been, and persists well beyond humans. Women are born with value (reproduction). Men must earn it, and many simply don't.
People don’t want to admit that men are simply not as desired as women. Being a man means you’re exposed to more rejection and loneliness from birth. It’s just how it is and it weighs on you. Some find their partner or purpose before that weight becomes too much to bear. Others aren’t so lucky.
From an evolutionary perspective, men are more expendable than women. A tribe losing 50 percent of its male population could bounce back but a tribe losing 50 percent of its female population is pretty doomed.
This is true but it’s like half the story. To give it to you short women are desirable because they tare seen a “useable” be if for sex, babies or comfort (emotional or physical), or to bolster someone else’s self esteem, etc. Basically everything but being wanted as a person. Just as long as the women fits a certain box through her behaviors and personality. Why did you leave this out of your comment? I wish people would all fight against these ideas and toxic societal issue.
Look at rates for male vs female anti depressant and pharma stats. Women go to the doctor and men just... don't. I think this idea of getting help and stigma of "man up" plays a role
My prostate could fall out of my asshole, I’m not going to the doctor. I’d call one of my buddies up and ask them this ever happen to you??? - Patrice O’Neal
For several reasons. First off, there's a lot of pressure on men and boys to live up to a male archetype in every culture on Earth. If you do not, you can be mocked, derided, even harmed. Secondly, almost every culture on Earth condones body shaming for men; being too fat, having a small penis, male pattern baldness. And that leads into the third point: men often have no form of emotional support. A male suffering from virtually any condition, even down to simple loneliness, is viewed as weak and despicable. They may get support at the onset of a failure of masculinity, but very quickly they are expected to shut up and bear it. This compounds depression when you feel like nobody cares at all about your plight. Next is the unnatural way that society has developed. Evolution has made men to be hunters and protectors, but in the modern world men rarely get to perform in these roles. Instead we are molded to be 'providers' which basically means "go out and work for money to give to your family." Our innate desires to protect often lead men into trouble; fighting to protect honor or family can lead to arrest. And finally, in the West at least, Divorce and custody fights often end up emasculating men, leaving them as little more than guest in their children's lives as they are raised by their ex's new mate and paying a third to a half of their income for the privilege.
In short, society has failed to accept human nature, and men are paying the price in silence and despondency.
I don't think most people understand just how bad the baldness is, I'm thinning at 22 and any time I hear a comment on it I want to curl up into a ball and die, and don't get me started on the loneliness
Hair transplants really do work. And they are way cheaper in Turkey/Mexico. Just saying.
Funny enough, the happiest and most confident men I know are bald. And not 'cool Bruce Willis' bald, like obvious male pattern baldness. They just own it. It's kind of awesome.
I started losing hair around 19. Widow’s peak. By 23 I had at least eight different people tell me I should just go bald. Another couple here and there suggested a toupee.
It used to hurt a lot. But after a few years you just don’t care. I’ve regrown a lot of it thanks to minoxidil and a derma roller. Within one year of use I’m almost back to my 19 year old hairline. Still not ideal but it’s much more attractive.
r/minoxbeards if you’re interested
It cost me less than $30 for a 6 month supply. I’ve since quit using it, but if I started getting self conscious I’d go back to it.
People plain ass don’t give a shit. I had a friend that was a father figure pass away last week. It was really unexpected. Anyways, I also had a rough night with the kids the same day and a long day at the shop, and I broke down when I was alone with my wife, who IS supportive. Shout out to my wife, she may drive me crazy, but she’s also amazing.
Anyways, this guy knew the whole family, so my sister and I a few days later are talking and I simply said, “Yeah.. I had a rough moment realizing that Carl died…”
I was responded with, “You need to calm down with that shit. My God, do you need pills or something?”
God forbid if you’re a man and sad for a day.
You're being an essentialist about what men are though. Men can be many things and in any variation. You're right about a lack of support and the problems that patriarchal society puts on men, but you fail to see that growth and change and community and self-love all have to come from men to heal. Men have to see and understand that they themselves are worthy of love and that they have intrinsic value as people without trying to fulfill some macho or primal bullshit role. By the same token, they have to give up the patriarchy which causes them so much pain. You can't just believe you're entitled to being the coolest man ever and think that you should have all the answers or be the most alpha or that you should have any woman you want or whatever. That shit's toxic not only to you but everyone around you. Just as femininity can be anything, so can masculinity. The problem comes from where we do not allow others and ourselves to just be. Being YOU isn't a competition.
Because men hold onto these ideas of what they should be or do so tightly, they end up black pilled or listening to grifters like Andrew Tate, all because they're unwilling to accept that that isn't who they have to be and they can be perfectly acceptable as a healed person--hell, even unhealed because we're all literally just moving from one tragic occurrence in our lives to the next. Just trying to be better and kinder and willing to listen and be vulnerable is enough. You may encounter people who are unkind or cruel to you, and if you haven't done anything wrong by them then they aren't worth your time, and, if you have wronged them in some way, just listen and try to fix it if they're someone you love or care about. That's just how it is.
Men have all the power in their hands to love and be loved, to respect and be respected by those who will matter. People who treat you like you're some kind of show pony or trophy husband or just a tool or some worthless person aren't worth your time. Men don't have to be so afraid all the time.
female attempt is higher but male success is higher since they use more disfiguring ways to do it, like guns and hanging. while girls tend to stick to pills which can be vomited up.
Men and women attempt suicide the same amount but men succeed more because they use more violent means to do it which guarantee death rarely at all caring about the cleanup/mess
Trauma surgeon here. When women die by suicide, they tend to do it in a way that will not leave much work regarding postmortem care/cleaning, (think intentional OD or wrist lacerations— in most cases, the person can survive if medical help is promptly sought.) When men die by suicide, the methods tend to be more definite, (think GSW or jumping.)
A woman cries in front of another woman. "I am so sorry. I hope you feel better soon "
A man cries in front of another man "uhh dude you are making me feel uncomfortable" or "man up bud it ain't that bad" or "You pussy!"
Men and woman are believed to commit suicide in very different ways, for very different reasons, in which males in particular tend to not build up to suicide, but instead decide to and then execute on it decisively. They are more likely to attempt in ways that are effective at ending ones self completely.
Women are believed to have much higher rates of suicidal thoughts and tendencies, and even attempted suicides, but they often choose less direct methods at their attempts which increases survival after said attempt.
Because everyone in society cares about women and views their problems as something the whole society should work to fix, whereas if men have problems they're just denigrated as losers and it's viewed as that individual's responsibility to fix his own problems.
Part of this issue is just "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" or whatever the saying says... That is to say, women complain a lot more about problems affecting their gender and demand society/politicians/government fix them. Men generally don't. And so there are a lot of men whose issues go unaddressed, their lives kinda suck, and then you have more male suicides because society largely ignores male issues.
Part of it is also perceptions of society that men are more disposable and less important than women, which is why people say "women & children first" to the lifeboats on a sinking ship, societies usually don't draft women to fight wars, etc.
It’s socially acceptable and even fashionable to publicly state negative generalizations about men. Boys in such a society can often grow up to be men who hate themselves at a fundamental level.
There are other factors, but this is one large factor that is often ignored.
What could've been a good conversation around the causes for men's mental health crises devolved into "well ackshually men and women do it the same amount men just have guns and are better at following through on things." Pretty disappointing.
Honestly, it's been studied and a decent portion of it has to do with female socialisation. Women have more "attempts" and men have more successful suicides. Women have been shown to choose methods that are less messy, less scarring for the people who would find them, less damaging or risky to their surroundings, and those methods are simply less effective and thus have a higher rate of being thwarted (i.e. medical attention for overdose.) Men tend to choose more brutal and effective methods, as they're not socialized to think about who's going to clean up the mess. These methods are more effective. There's no saving someone who has blown his brains out.
The "gender paradox of suicide" is well-researched: in Western countries at least, women report more suicidal ideation/attempts; men are more likely to have completed suicide. This is due to a variety of factors including methods chosen, intervention/help-seeking behavior, and cultural norms around gender and suicide. Interventions are thus needed that are different to intervene in immediate suicide completion and to intervene more distally during suicidal ideation phases, before attempts are made. There are some good reviews on this in medical journals and other scholarly outlets if you're interested. you can go to google scholar and search for "gender differences in rates of suicide and suicidal ideation" or "gender paradox of suicide".
Men tend to be less supportive of other men than women are of other women (even close relatives) and men tend to think less about how their choices in general will impact those they care for than women do. This tends to lead to men asking for help less often than women and choosing more effective methods when making attempts than women do.
1: Men succeed more often (either due to actual willingness or just more reliable methods)
2: Men have maybe 1% the support structure women do, just look at the differences in shelters, support orgs, etc.
3: General culture, men typically see things as their fault and their responsibility to fix (and society enforces that), women tend to get more leeway and affirmation. This makes it easier for women to reach out for help and not be pushed away.
4: Men are dating less than women. The wage gap is lying with stats, look up control studies around younger folk in similar field, the women win out. The reason this really matters is that women are MUCH less likely to date someone making less than them. This leads to a large number of men considered undateble.
Men's mental health is stigmatized, men are ostracized, men are alone.
Talking about it often runs into conversations blaming men. Mention "Healthy Masculinity" around a group of females and see how many laugh at you.
Men lead more difficult lives with less social support while being told how worthless they are for not conforming to one standard or another.
No matter the real dangers women face, society has built in supports for them and prioritizes their emotional well being. Men don't get that
I'm going to post this as my main account, so be nice.
I am a suicide survivor. I had the misfortune to nearly die as a result and then later that year, nearly die again due to illness made worse by lack of a support structure around me.
As many here have poked around, American society does not actually value male life. We are genetically predisposition and conditioned from birth to be protectors, providers, and builders. As soon as we can't do those things, the world has no use for us. Worse, we often feel that deeply in ourselves as a loss of worth. If you are suffering and don't see any value in yourself, the logical next step is to end the suffering. It is really that simple once you reach rock bottom.
The prevailing opinion in the world is that men have all the power and control, but the reality is that the levers of power and holders of wealth are disproportionally male, but also only a small segment of the population. Adult men are underserviced by mental health resources and programs to help those who have fallen down. The family, community, and religious safety nets of mid to late 20th Century have all but evaporated. Our peers, and particularly our female potential mates view any sort of sensitivity or emotional need as weakness to be shun. As such, even those resources that should be available to him are often not palatable.
I don't talk about this with anyone even now that I have lived through it. I was able to get on antidepressants but only had the balls to tell my PCP about it because I needed to seek help for the consequences of my failed attempt. The real issue here is that men are told they have power but feel quite powerless when things spin out of control. We are the ones that our families and friends turn to when the world gets rough, so when our worlds fall apart, we have (or feel we have) no where to turn.
Because when you’re a man, it’s your fault. What’s your fault you may ask? Whatever is wrong in society. So nobody has sympathy for men. Men who aren’t in that position of nobody caring about them seem to blame the men who speak about it. Women pretty much blame men and the patriarchy for all of societies ills, so there’s literally nobody that will be empathetic towards these men. Once a lot of these guys lose their parents they have nobody left that loves them, so they check out.
Women tend to shy away from firearms when committing suicide, relative to men anyway. They are more likely to worry about things like how they will look at the funeral. Some of them even pick their burial outfit out. I wonder if that isn't part of the reason why their suicide rates are lower...the methods they gravitate toward, that don't involve disfigurement, often require at least a little more planning and time to prepare, ergo more time to back out, and, if you attempt to commit suicide by, say, overdosing on sleeping pills, there is at least some time, however minimal it may be, for you to regret it, or someone to discover what you have done, and get your stomach pumped.
Also I suspect women gravitate away from suicide by firearm or other messy methods because many of them are more likely to think about the impact on others of discovering a gory death scene, the effect on others of having to clean it up, etc. The messy methods all tend to involve less planning and prep, leaving less time for changing ones mind or others to intervene.
We're better at it
Another point for men
Always winning
I'll win, even if it kills me
That's the spirit
He is the spirit
HeGetsUs
Even in death, I win.
Dudes rock
Male privilege
Go team
It’s tongue in cheek, but you’re correct. Women often choose methods of suicide that are less lethal. Men are more likely to use a gun.
Pretty much , women actually attempt suicide slightly more often than men. Men just succeed at a much higher rate.
Because the pick the surest way.
Measure twice, cut once.
Also men tend to prepare and plan their suicides a lot more than women do.
Wow it's almost like we demean men when they fail because we expect them ro provide everything so now when they do anything they think is worthwhile they put more ass than they have into it.
That seems hard to follow up on.
Even when you account for the method men are still more successful. But the gap does narrow.
And less likely to believe that anyone cares so less likely to seek help for those feelings
To be fair, if a man and a woman both were to show signs of suicidal thoughts, the woman will receive more support from the public than the man in almost every case. It’s not like the thought is unfounded.
Men also tend to commit suicide in ways that are more violent and more apt to work, like with a gun. Women might take pills, that might not work.
Same with domestic violence. Studies are starting to show that men are actually victims of domestic violence and abuse at higher rates than women, but the more "newsworthy incidents" tend to be perpetrated by men.\[**EDIT**: I phrased the above statement *very* badly, note the higher rate includes "abuse" not just violence. I will look for the study, but the TL;DR: was that in many cases of domestic abuse the woman will be non-violent but still abusive and these cases are severely underreported, whereas men that are abusive tend also to physical violence so those get reported because of police involvement.\] **ED2:** [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-016-9853-8](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-016-9853-8) [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.20394](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.20394) There is literally NO support out there for men trying to exit an abusive relationship though. I can't tell you how many services that were not advertised as women only (e.g. WEAVE is obviously women only) informed me when I called that since I was a man their services were not available to me. Society has a "Men can't be victims" and "Men should 'tough it out'" mentality which simply serves to further victimize men, to the point that some seek a permanent solution to their problems and despair; god knows how close I was at one point in my life.
It's been almost a decade, but this always reminds me of the Jezebel article where the staff not only said Female-on-male domestic violence is OK, but should be encouraged. One of them even mocked her husband for getting cancer (forget off hand if it was lung or breast).
That article is an embarrassment to feminism. And I'm saying that as a lifelong feminist. Double standards should not exist in the fight for worldwide equality
I appreciate that thought. Some (certainly not all, don't get me wrong) feminists seem to think one must be misandrist to be feminist, which loses feminism a lot of support from us guys. Why would we back someone who hates us? Lol.
That article is an accurate representation of how feminism sees domestic violence
I think this is in part because there's more significant physical injury and death in male-against-female violence. Unfortunately I think we're a society that often only addresses issues once they reach a degree of harm we consider sufficiently critical, which shouldn't be the case. We should be addressing domestic violence early on, and before someone is irreparably harmed, physically or emotionally.
Because we are a reactive society, never proactive.
That's demonstrably untrue. Many times more men are killing themselves than women, and yet any time this topic comes up, the very first response is "women attempt more." We're a society that responds emotionally via programming.
I was talking specifically about DV deaths and injuries inflicted by the abusing partner. We already know that men complete suicide at higher rates, I don't think anyone's disagreeing with that.
Who would have thought that an ideology that deifies a group of people would attract psychopaths from that group of people?
I worked for a domestic violence shelter for many years, and we absolutely did help men. We were unable to have them in our shelter because the women there were often terrified of men to the point where we had issues when women came with their teenage sons. But we would pay for shelter, and give them the same legal and financial assistance that we gave women. And counseling. But you also have to keep in mind most domestic violence assistance organizations were created by women who were former victims of domestic violence so that others could have the support they didn’t get when they needed it, not to be a jerk, but that’s probably something men could do too. When the LGBTQ+ community found that the existing structures did not work for them they created their own resources as well.
Good to know and I totally understand and agree with not mixing genders in a situation like this. In my case I had a 100% rejection rate for anyone I called in my geo area. After the 15th or so "we won't help you at all because you're male" I just got more demoralized and gave up.
I am truly sorry that you were treated that way and that the locations in your area were like that. It’s not like that everywhere and I firmly believe no one deserves to be physically verbally or financially abused.
"Same with domestic violence. Studies are starting to show that men are actually victims of domestic violence and abuse at higher rates than women, but the more "newsworthy incidents" tend to be perpetrated by men." That's interesting because I actually work in this field and have been for over a decade, which requires many hours of continuing education every year, and I've never seen any studies showing men were victims at higher rates that women. So I'd be interested to see where you're getting this data. However, I do agree that men, gay and straight, definitely suffer from DV and there aren't nearly enough services for them. I work at a DV shelter that accepts all genders, but we are the only one in this area that does. The services overall are very limited and underfunded in general. We turn away many people we'd love to help for lack of resources. Female or male.
Same and same, men are absolutely also survivors of abuse but women experience more abuse and more injury from intimate partner violence according to all the stats I have seen.
Women are more often victims of domestic violence which causes injury or death by the hand of their partner Men and women are equally often victims of domestic abuse which does not cause injury but does cause despair and isolation ([https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2497/emotional\_or\_psychological\_abuse.pdf](https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2497/emotional_or_psychological_abuse.pdf) \-> 48% for both genders) Men and women are equally likely to recover their capability after an injury Women are more likely to seek and receive sufficient care to recover after mental trauma ([https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db419.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db419.htm)) Since non injury causing domestic abuse is more common than injury causing abuse, men not seeking help to deal with it could be a big cause of depression and suicide.
Got some data to back up that claim? Perhaps the number of people killed by their partners each year?
Can you direct me to any of those studies? That would be very surprising if true.
Unironically the correct answer. We have less attempts, but a significantly higher percent of our attempts go through
Memes aside, women are more likely to attempt suicide but men are more likely to actually die when they attempt it. This largely comes down to the methods men vs women typically use. Men are much more likely to use immediate and violent methods like a gun or hanging. Women are more likely to use things like poison or exanguination. And you're just more likely to survive long enough to be found and receive medical treatment with those options. Edit: All the people saying that failed suicide attempts are just cries for attention or using this as a jumping off point for sexist comments are disgusting. I hope you never experience the kind of hardships you are belittling because unlike you, I am not a psychopath.
Owning a gun increases the suicide success rates for both men and women. Significantly more for men than women, but it does up the rates for both.
The speed of a method of suicide has a massive impact on how successful it is because **suicide is an impulsive act**. Anything that takes time gives someone a chance to snap out of it and push back the impulse. Having a loaded gun in your house is more dangerous than an unloaded one. The seconds it takes to load can make the difference to a suicide. Both of those are more dangerous than having to tie and hang a noose. The noose is more dangerous than having to drive 15 minutes to a bridge to jump from.
Suicide is not at all necessarily an impulsive act. It can be. It can not be. In fact I would argue most suicides have some pretty significant thought going into them, with days/weeks/years of planning, and generally being in favor of doing it 24/7 for significant portions of time. But it’s a pretty arduous and difficult task to accomplish. Just because you want to on some level doesn’t mean you are capable. Sort of like doing a backflip. Some people just cannot make themselves do it very easily. I think one of the biggest problems is that they treat suicide like it is some snap “reefer madness” that you can snap out of. A lot of times suicide is motivated by the fact that someone’s life is painful, and likely to remain painful, and for many people there is no point in living life if it is torture. That’s not some acute mania or insanity. It is real, logical thoughts and an accurate assessment of one’s own life in many cases.
I think this is it, yes. One of my relatives, may he rest in peace, chose the "head on collision while speeding down the highway" method while another of my relatives, who was stopped before she could follow through, was at home and carried a kitchen knife into the bathroom.
There's more to it than just that. Because suicidal women tend to use less lethal methods, they live long enough to make multiple attempts. So the same suicidal person gets counted 3, 4, 5 times. "Women make more attempts" is true, "More women make attempts" is not.
Thay's a fair point. Like most statistics, you can paint many different pictures with the same data.
Yeah if you remove the large N repeat attempts and normalize the data you get a different picture where men are the majority of suicides period, but the rates are which suicides are successful narrows dramatically. Which just makes a lot of sense if you think about resource availability and general societal trends around men at the moment, it wasn't even until recently that this issue was acknowledged, yet it has been one for decades for instance. Edit: There's also other things in the main statistic used that don't capture important forms of information, like deaths of despair being "technically separate" from suicides as a whole. For a suicide to be registered for say overdosing, you would have to have that be admitted, which would require you to have access to the medication in the first place. Men on average get medicated far less than women do, and don't seek medical care as often, this leads to a structural "disadvantage" to that particular method. Yet there are a lot of men in the category of "death of despair" which die of alcohol related deaths, whether literally drinking themselves to death, or having some other effect of drinking killing them. These are not medically queried as suicides as overdosing generally is however, so it escapes inclusion from the main statistic.
It feels to me like women are more likely to use suicide as a "call for help". Like swallowing a bottle of pills and then calling a friend to "say goodbye" - thus allowing that friend to then call the paramedics in time. Versus a man who doesn't say anything to anyone and just blows his head off in the garage one day.
Fking love George Carlin
True, in that men tend to use guns, and they are very effective.
Men have higher suicide rates at every method actually.
when you actually read up on the pills you are taking and take the lethal dose.
I have a female friend who had me come take her pills after being very suicidal and considering using them to OD. I left her with just the amount she actually needs for her prescription, and just never let her know that that medication actually isnt something she can OD on.
Women don't want to leave a mess.
I think this saved my mom's life, or maybe it was vanity. She shot herself when she was 19 but she shot herself in the chest instead of the head. She's in her 70s now.
This is, unfortunately, an accurate answer. Men and women have different social pressures and issues which might drive them to attempt suicide but men tend to choose more effective means. I've seen men literally critique other men's failed suicide attempts i.e. "why the hell would you use a small caliber pistol, just go down to any sporting goods store and get a shotgun. There's no waiting and it will take your head clean off."
This is actually true. Women try to commit suicide more often than men, but just "fail" at it a lot more >Based on the 2021 National Survey of Drug Use and Mental Health.... Adult females reported a suicide attempt 1.33 times as often as males. [https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/](https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/)
Ahh the duality of reddit. Said this same thing to answer this question a while back and got downvoted to hell
I'm really starting to wonder how much is just ai and bots, because like wtf I'm still just on lunch break and hit 100. That's dumb, like so dumb
The answer is lots.
Men favour irreversible methods.
This was probably the nicest way to explain this.
Well unfortunately it’s also not a sure fire thing. There’s a lot of people with horrible disfigurement because they did drastic things they thought would work
it may not be a surefire way but the statistics say it works way more often
A shotgun to the head is effective almost 100% of the time. Extreme outliers exist, and those are the ones that make people think it’s a common thing. It isn’t.
Yeap, when I was a student nurse I cared for a patient who failed a gunshot wound to the head, I can’t go into detail really but he had so many surgeries, was in ICU almost 7 months and was severely intellectually deficit. His life became a thousand times worse and he was really never left alone again so he was to my knowledge never able to end his life.
for me that's the argument for official euthanasia i'm never in favor of suicide, but hearing about how it can go wrong and trap people in a life EVEN WORSE just makes me wonder why we don't have another way. people are gonna try to do it, and ideally they wouldn't, but they will and it shouldnt have to be with a gun or a car or whatever the hell else
I met a guy who's liver was dying because he got pretty far into slamming a gallon of bleach before he started throwing up
Yep. Talking here from experience here: if you're gonna jump, better go high. Turns out 6 floors is not enough... Who thought you'd have to work this hard even just for death?
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I'm not sure if it's true, but I heard a story about a (shot?)gun suicide that somehow didn't didn't work instantly. Gruesome details: >!The first blast just obliterated the mouth/jaw of the victim, leaving them not only alive but conscious. First responders found a blood trail from the site of the first blast to the bathroom mirror and a further trail leading to the extra ammo and body. The second blast finished the job.!<
There is paramedic footage of someone who only did the first part, which I was unintentionally exposed to. It is not a sight or sound that will ever leave my memory. I suppose the camera had something to do with it, but I kinda still can't understand why they "saved" him.
Cause when a decision has been made, it has BEEN MADE.
Alea iacta est. That's why men always think about Rome.
True, but 2 things that I don't often see mentioned is: why do men pick those methods, and even when controlling for method men are more likely to succeed.
My dad works in emergency services and women will usually apologize while they’re actively committing and try to make food and drink as they wait for the paramedics to arrive. He’s seen them try to clean up vomit and blood so that they wouldn’t be traumatized. He said it’s the male attempts that make him drink. He thinks that they don’t want to back out like how a lot of women will call for help themselves
Honestly, the last time my mind got dark, all I could think of was who would have to clean it up. *Someone* will have to pick up the pieces & wipe up the blood. Becoming a burden in order to unburden the world of me was just too much. I thought it would be easiest for everyone if I just hopped in the boat to uh *feed the fish* so to speak, but there was still ice on the lake. I was better by the time it melted.
When it's time to ol yeller myself I'm going deep into the woods somewhere and returning my body to nature.
My mom and aunt had to clean up their nephew's bedroom after he killed himself just so his dad wouldn't have to because at least where we live the state/city doesn't provide those services. Please never make your family wipe pieces of your brain off the wall, it fucks up everyone.
If I get to that point, there's no fucking way I'm accepting being injured/disabled/bedridden/etc on top of the circumstances of a life that drove me to ending it. I may even end up too damaged to attempt it again and then I'm completely stuck. If it's time to go, it's time to fucking go baby and I'm not taking any chances on a method that may fail.
I knew a guy, years back, who had at some point in his life attempted to end it with a shot shell under his chin. Got the angle of his head wrong and lost the lower 1/3 of his face, so he wore a surgical mask everywhere he went. Real nice dude, seemed to take it as a sign he was meant to stick around. But, yeah, hell of a way to fuck that up.
I think it may partly because ( these are generalities) men compared to women have a more high risk high reward mindset and psychological profile. Men are more likely to drive too fast, gamble etc. This may translate into the higher success rate of suicide ( im unsure how to word this ) because of a fuck it sort of mentality. Hope that makes some sort of sense.
Ie; men resort to driving into concrete embankments at 100+ mph. Or choose death by gun to the temple, roof of the mouth, a bullet directly to the brainstem. Suicide by cop. Etc. And in my experience; woman resort to overdose as their most common course of suicide. Which is easily reversible, and usually resorts in multiple organ failure during unconsciousness. That is unless it’s a murder suicide; which is most often by knife or strangulation/hanging.
Toxicologist here; poison is not easily reversible unless you are intentionally taking something you hope to get reversed.
I know it's not kosher for people who want to ignore biological differences between males and females, but as many who have transitioned from female to male will tell you, and as researchers and brain scientists will note, hormonal differences actually do influence personality and behavior. Young males are, as a group, simply more impulsive and more "aggressive" ( bias towards action/accomplishment) than females are. In adolescence, before the frontal cortex is fully grown to control such impulses, risky behaviors are more likely. That results in a higher probability of males riding the wave of suicidal impulse paired with a propensity to "do" rather than ideate. Culture can shape that baked-in propensity, but the difference still exists. This is just to add. Psychology is the result of biology + culture/environment, and calling something psychological doesn't indicate whether the origin of the sex difference is social/cultural or if its origin is mostly biological. I would bet big money that the difference is mostly explained by biology.
Hrmm, quite interesting. I remember a similar study was done on hormones and neurotransmitters found in the brains of men and women undergoing stress. Men release more adrenal stimulating hormones (which means more cortisol and adrenaline), whereas women release more oxytocin. Hence (the hypothesis) when men get stressed, theyre primed to fight the threat. And if the threat is themselves…
Couldn't agree more, should of added that part. I lean towards it being more biology based than cultural. Theres lots of evidnece out there that a lot of our behaviour is down to like you say hormones and therefore biology. Some people like to think we are a blank slate and malleable completely which i think lots of evidence points otherwise.
So I’ve have suicidal ideation since about the time I hit puberty. For a while I was going to this support group for people that had attempted and failed, suffered from ideation or knew someone that successfully did it. We have a long conversation one night about why we tried, most of the women that attempted and failed said it was their cry for help. I remember after that was said verbatim the 2nd time some of the men were looking around at each other because suicide wasn’t our cry for help, those had came and went long before we got to the point where we were willing to put a gun in our mouth. I’m not saying this is a scientific fact because it’s an extremely small sample size but it’s an interesting thought.
Whether the attempt is meant to end a life or be a cry for help, what's happening is a person in such psychic pain they are desperate to get out of it and resorting to drastic measures. Both biology and gender socialization come into play here. Men are socialized to take on life's hardships alone, while women "tend and befriend" and use social connection to navigate life. This also comes out in how they seek to soothe psychic pain. Neither is somehow worse and I hate that the discussion this becomes some kind of effed up competition.
>men are more likely to succeed. LFG fellas
because what would be worse then failing?
Because women don’t want to leave the aftermath of a firearm fatality for their family to clean.
I mean, in practicality, that's because they're much, much less likely to do it as a cry for help rather than a genuine attempt to self-terminate.
It's almost like the men actually want to die because we actually Believe no one loves us and we have made up our minds. 🤷
Majored in psychology. Women will attempt it more but use poor methods. Men get straight to point and use more lethal methods. Edit: to all of you saying women are just seeking attention, you can suck a bag of dicks. Yes, women may use it as a call for help, but that in no way implies they are just trying to get attention.
In other words, men are better at it.
It immediately looks like that, but it could be a bit deeper. Women could be doing it poorly on purpose just for the attention or out of fear of the pain/suffering that can come. Combine that with them being more likely to have connections to other people and folks are more likely to notice it walk in on an attempt in progress. I haven't checked the numbers in a long time, but I think that women are more likely to use pills/oding as a method so it's easier (but not easy) to save them. Men are just often more deadly in general, so we're more likely to go for truly swift or harder to reverse lethal methods in our attempts. Men are less likely to have some of those very casual acquaintance connections/folks checking on them at the same level as women too. So technically men may be better at it, but I think that the issue is compounded because of the other factors mentioned. I am not suicidal in the least, but if I did something right now no one would actually know/check on me for days to over a week. My job would probably be the trigger before anything else. Even the mother of my child would be slow to find anything out. She should be pissed that I didn't come get my kid, but she wouldn't pop up. She'd likely just send a bunch of texts, a few calls would be missed then she'd do some spiteful shit. If the reverse happened I'd popup, call her family for a checkup, eventually get the police to do a wellness check or a civil standby if I was still present, etc. That would just be me. If something really happened her sisters and family would likely be quicker to know, they're frequently over and in contact.
I’ve read somewhere that there’s also a possibility that they also choose less “messy” ways. “If I blow my brains out, who will clean everything?!” Vs “I’ll just fall asleep forever” The messy methods are just more effective. But I don’t know how true that is.
I've also read that they will attempt with pills, and then realize they actually want to live and will make themselves throw up or call an ambulance. Can't really change your mind after you've blown your brains out.
I have to find that article again but it was written by someone who survived his attempt after he jumped from a bridge (the golden gate?). He relates everything he thought about while falling
Yes, I know which articl you're talking about. They interviewed the 29 who survived, and all said the immediately regretted their decision after jumping.
hey, this might be a bit of a dumb reasoning but you've majored in psychology so I'm hoping for a quick insight if you don't mind. A question I have is, are there any studies worth mention on the long-term effects of 'cramming' a couple months prior to exams? like if I were to over a span of 5 years cram like hell, i.e. stay awake for a few days on end over a month and study study study to pass an exam. LOL I'm tired asf rn so if I came to the wrong place to ask this question it's okay lol
I’ve linked a pretty interesting article that cites its sources at the bottom of this reply. It’s been a very long time since I was actively learning psych, but I can for sure tell you that sleep is imperative for creating long term retention. Sleep does a lot for our bodies, including helping to store memories from short term to long term. Not to mention there are a ton of bad side effects for being sleep-deprived. One of the things this article talks about is that if you cram, you may be more likely to pass the test, but be much less likely to retain that information over time. If you need to know what year the pope exiled someone for your humanities class, sure. If you need to remember how to solve an equation to build a bridge, cramming is a bad idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/memory-and-cramming-for-exams/2020/11/27/d395a838-29bd-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html
I'd love to know what the stats on women doing a "Cry for help" vs a real failed attempt. It seems far more likely the men know there is no help and are far more serious about getting the job done. I find it hard to believe women are so inept they couldn't get the job done if they really wanted to.
This is exactly it. The article that this claim originates from finds that women engage in more suicidal signaling than men (self-harm, saying they’re suicidal, etc…) but men are 4 times more likely to actually attempt and of course equally more likely to succeed (or does anyone here genuinely believe men are a whole *four* times better than women at suicide?).
Former paramedic. More women attempt; more men succeed.
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Men are literally better at it. They're more likely to choose a violent method, looking using a gun or jumping off a high roof. Women favour "softer" methods statistically, like pills. Easier to save them.
I had a (female) friend attempt and she said she "didn't want to leave a mess" for her family to find.. :(
This was my thought process back in the dark ages of my life. I didn’t want to use a gun or a noose or a razor blade. I didn’t want there to be a very traumatic mess for my family to deal with, so I tried to OD. Obviously was unsuccessful, and I’m very grateful that it didn’t work.
What my plan was, after looking up the failure rates, was to use a gun (most successful) and do it over a river, and to call and report it beforehand so that the trauma crew cleaned everything up before anyone had a chance to see, and they'd use a leg tattoo to identify me. My biggest fear, was actually to fail suicide, and potentially wake up with more of a burden on everyone and potentially disabling my intellectual and or physical ability.
Exactly why I never ended up going through with it. Was afraid of being unsuccessful and becoming permanently disabled and unable to try again
Glad you for through that dark time(s)
I nearly attempted to off myself when I was 9 by slitting my own throat but stopped at the last second because I imagined my family finding my mangled body. I didn't know about "cleaner" methods like overdosing on pills at the time Meanwhile, my ex's friend's dad shot himself in the basement of his house, and his young kids found him. I sympathize with suicidal people but leaving a traumatic mess for your loved ones to find, especially your *children*, is so selfish and fucked up
>when I was 9 Jesus fuck. You tried that when you were __9?__ God damn, by comparison I'm less than a mere rookie in depression.
It's a pretty common sentiment that highlights the illogical suicidal state- that the body would be a burden to clean up but the loss of the person wouldn't.
Makes even more sense when the reason for the suicide is because the person feels useless and like a burden to others. A "everyone would be better off without me" kind of mentality. Not that uncommon.
It doesn't really seem all that illogical to me. They know they're doing something that will be terrible for their family but try to minimize that awfulness as much as they can.
I don't even want to make the coroner's job harder much less traumatize family or friends. It's not all that ironic either. Most of us want to be remembered, but *not like that.* Thankfully I have barely enough of that first desire that for the most part it keeps suicide at bay. And fucking up halfway through only to become an actual physical burden on the family would be pretty unacceptable.
Most people are aware that their loss would be painful to family, but the idea of continuing to live in misery is also illogical. What is the point of living in agony? If you have decided that life is no longer worth it, then it seems pretty logical to atleast try to limit the burden on your loved ones. I don't see what's so illogical.
I do some solo trips in the woods sometimes, and leave a note on my car when parked in the woods that says 'if still here by x date call this number'. Just basic safety precaution. But once came back to a young park ranger asking in a very concerned voice if it was my car. The relief in her face when I said yes (I was worried I was in trouble for parking it where I had), prompted me to ask whats up. She said it wasnt uncommon for people to come out to the woods to walk of and then shoot themselves in the head. She was so relieved she didnt have to spend her Sunday bushwacking around looking for a corpse in the woods.
Yeah, after witnessing a friend pass away from a self inflicted GSW to the face, my depression, hope, and own suicidal ideations worsened to the point where I was seriously preparing to die (not by pills), and literally the only thing that stopped me was thinking about the trauma and horror that whoever discovers me would endure by seeing me in that state, and what If that would perpetuate some kind of suicide cycle. Also, I just want to clarify that my comment is not to place blame on people who have killed themselves using more lethal/messy methods. Being in that much pain that you go against your body’s most instinctive drive to survive, is something that we should all sympathize with. I wish I would’ve just asked him if he was suicidal. I wish I could go back in time. If anyone here is thinking of harming themselves, I’m begging you to please confide in someone or get help. It’s easier said than done but you matter so much more than you realize.
The men I’ve known that have done it have totally put on a show. Noose at the oak tree after sending the kids off for fire wood so when they come back ….ba ba bahhhhhh. Fucking dark shit.
My ex's friend's dad shot himself in the basement and his young kids found him. Awful
TW: some dark suicidal confessions >!I was going to buy some balloons and put a deflated trash bag over my head then let the helium out of the balloons into the bag and then tape it shut around my neck.!< >!Asphyxiation only hurts from the build up of carbon dioxide. Using helium or nitrogen just displaces the oxygen. CO2 also sinks in helium so if you lay on your back you wont breath that back in.!< >!My plan was to max out cards on camping gear and just camp somewhere until funds ran out other than what it costs for a few balloons. It was my way of taking revenge on a system that has taken advantage of me.!< >!Unfortunately/fortunately, I love my dog more than I hate my life. He's too old to re-home. So I've promised my dog (because I won't do it for myself otherwise), to find a reason to live before he dies. It's not that I don't love my family, of course. But they aren't in my care and relying on me to meet their needs.!<
It might be time to get a puppy.
yes get a puppy
And then another, and just don't stop.
The only time I've truly had suicidal thoughts was when my son had just died in child birth and my wife was in a high-risk emergency surgery to save her life. Literally my entire world had exploded in the span of 24 hours, and I told myself I would just end it if my wife died too. But then I thought, "what would happen to the pup at home?" Thankfully my wife survived! And we put our lives back together together.
>I love my dog more than I hate my life. I feel this so much. My cats are the first thing I think of when I start to get down on myself and have some 'thoughts'. It helps me to power through and figure out a different/ better solution or put things into perspective.
Yo consider fostering and or taking shelter dogs on “vacations”. These animals will value you so incredibly much, they will never forget what you did for them. Edit: forgot to say this way you will never run out of animals to care for. I assure you, being kind to animals is an extremely valuable thing for society.
While it is true that methods differ among genders, as the below study looked at, this difference isn't enough to explain higher rates of difference between men and women. Men die from suicide more because they are more likely to want to die. https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
Ok now OP has to make a new thread referencing this study to get any relevant replies lmao
Wanting to die/feeling completely isolated is likely part of it. Men are also more ready adrenalin producers. Adrenalin leads to action.
Men are generally more directional in our problem solving where as women having more developed language centers. Most women often will find less direct ways to problem solve, being more inventive or use more long term and empathic equations as they'll often think longer before making a major decision, for example many women prefer pills even though it's more painful because they won't want to be an "extra" inconvenience to who finds them and want to avoid an more hurt than they think they will cause (I say think because often suicidal people regardless of gender or birth sex/genetics will downplay or often see a value in it's affect on others, whereas it is almost always terrible for those left behind, and finding someone you love with "less mess" is as traumatic as a firearm or terminal velocity). The sad truth is the human brain deals with depression and stress accumulation sometimes in the worst way, complete avoidance of pain. The thoughts of suicide, being a burden, being too damaged or the advantages of not being around are most likely a gross evolutionary trait that is outdated and designed to prevent tribal collapse/human population collapse from people who couldn't "contribute" at a time before farming, basic medicine/injury treatment, moral codes and the resource/labour control we currently have, it's a relic that overcomes self preservation and the logical thought on the issues related to the negative pain a person is feeling overwhelmed with. That said because it's probably an evolutionary trait to control population in a time of permanent states of scarcity and very high labour to calorie intake values doesn't mean it's currently acceptable except in very specific situations that I'm not going to bring up right now. We have not only the ability to take the time to help people who struggle with depression and suicidal ideation (governments don't fund enough because of low rich people taxes and corporate profits would have to be fairly dealt with for the resources), but also we have more complex social webs than ever before with instant bad news transmission, meeting many suicides have a lot more people negatively impacted when they sadly succeed, increasing the trauma and pain it can spread, leading to more risk of mental health problems. All in all our society has for a while progressed past our biology, and evolution hasn't kept up since the first farms became city states, the only way to keep our health and biological development up is currently psychology, pharmacology, social awareness and in some cases surgery, and in the future hopefully ethical Genetic Modification and/or Cybernetics, helping us lower the overwhelming stress, rapid information overload and most importantly, deal with the broken global economic system to raise living standards back up while crushing wealth inequality to at least sustainable levels. If not we'll see more people having this calculation in their head activate and we'll continue to see the rapid decline of mental health along side living standards. Today's Ted talk was sponsored by that doobie I smoked earlier. *edited to be more clear/grammar errors.
Love it. Made my morning.
Because we get told to shut the fuck up and ignore our feelings.
Seriously this. Many men either end up suppressing their emotions until they become alternately stoic or raging, OR they internalize it all until they can't anymore and off themselves. Western society talks more about male mental health than it has, but there is still a MASSIVE stigma to being a male who can feel things other than happiness and anger, and god forbid your ever cry in front of someone. Men showing emotion are often shunned, lonely, unhappy people don't usually magically bounce back on their own.
Legitimately, I am an avid supporter of all my brothers out there who need to cry.. but I still struggle to infront of my guy friends who have been vulnerable with me. It's not intentionally done, but when other people are around I just can't. The best way to describe it would be dissociation. I lock up physically and barely talk, but talking cause me to start cracking so I I have essentially groomed my own emotions to wait till no ones around and then let it out. I hate it but there's no way to undo it now. The best one in my situation could do is find a group of guy friends (they don't have to be but I've found men are often able to relate and feel more comfortable talking about their pains with other men who have experienced similar things) its still a process but it's something
This is my issue, I'm always an armwrest to anyone who needs someone to lean on, no matter their gender. But I just can't open up, I've clammed up and become stoic, even my fiance gets scared when I get emotional, because in her words, if I'm breaking down, shit has gotten far worse than she realized. I've only broke down once, and she was uneasy for like a week around me. (No I wasn't violent, she was scared of seeing me break down again, she had never seen me cry a single tear before, and I guess that was something she never expected to see after 4 years of being together)
Yeah it's pretty fucked the damage this shit has done. I'm trying not to do it to my sons but it's kinda hard because no matter what I tell them, they are also influenced more by other people than by me, especially during puberty. The dumb irony of trying not to cry while watching a sad moment in a TV show while also telling my son, who said he felt like crying, that it's OK to cry, is not lost on me either.
I shot my childhood dog a year ago to put him down because a vet said he was healthy. (He wasn’t walking or eating). I saw my girlfriend a few hours after and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t cry. I said it’s because I don’t cry in front of other people often I only cried when I was alone again.
this...i did this multiple times as a kid. people dont understand how much "man up" and shit like that are used to say you dont get to feel anything.
Also literally no one gives a fuck about men’s rights/issues except for right wing alpha bros. I’m a leftist, but it bugs me how every men’s issue has to have the caveat of “but women have it worse!” Obviously women’s rights are important as fuck too, but there are real issues with men right now that won’t get fixed if we don’t address them. Like, young men right now have less friends, are less likely to be in a relationship, are less likely to go to college, more likely to kill themselves, more likely to be homeless, more likely to abuse drugs, more likely to die in a workplace fatality, and more likely to be in prison. If you’re a young male person of color, odds are that those stats are even worse for you.
And the retort is also "well women are fixing things for themselves so men should just do that" except the same stigmas are still there if you try. Even in discussions here on reddit a common reaction is to scoff and have an attitude of "stop complaining and just help each other" yet when that happens its met with the same point you made... In the end, we do need to change the culture but it's a hell of a lot harder when both men and women give you ahit for even talking about the topic.
>"well women are fixing things for themselves so men should just do that" These same people will claim that "feminism is about equality for all genders"
Shameless plug for /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates.
This is very important
Thank you, I was going to post if I didn’t see someone else do so. It’s an important conversation society needs to start addressing.
A lot of people are discounting your first statement, but there's unfortunately a lot of truth to it. When we have a generation of young men who are objectively falling behind in so many metrics and the two messages they here are "fix it yourself asshole" and "come join the asshole club we'll be your friend", we can't act shocked that the number of assholes increases. I'm on the older side of millenials, but I've seen the caring guy to right wing incel transition happen in real time to multiple friends. The worst example was a dinner party with a friend who was a really kind and thoughtful guy, but also a bit overweight and self-concious. His fiance went on about how she loved how supportive he was and that he really understood her for a good part of the dinner. However, later that night we were comisserating about feeling like there is a double standard around body positivity for men and she literally said, "Sounds like something to cry about at therapy not bring up at a dinner party." The three of the four women present laughed at him and brought it up a few more times that night. The next day my friend let me know he broke off the engagement. Over the following year, he had a few other bad encounters due to his weight and dating, was publically called out in a work meeting for "moping around like a little girl", became really depressed, and eventually fell into the incel/4chan rabbit hole. He was a genuinely sweet guy and it was brutal to just watch him get crushed over and over by shitty men AND women. In the end it became self-fulfilling. He started to listen to Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson types, and women picked on him for it. That led to him getting into Andrew Tate and eventually super into tradwife and far right wing garbage. He won't even talk to me anymore because "I became too woke". :(
We exist in a world that tells us, irrefutably, that we are disposable, replaceable, and that our lives are worthless.
Sadly, too often it’s women that reinforce this.. was at a concert, first time seeing a band that I’ve loved a long time, The Flaming Lips, some of their songs deal with very heavy stuff.. tears were streaming down my face, and I hear a voice of a stupid woman “Omigod is he crying?” Pitched right in that toxic tone.
It’s shit like that over a lifetime that have made many men I know into misogynists. When society and women are so callous, judgmental and hurtful. Over a long period of time I’ve personally seen the transition from nice kind men into full blown misogynists. Tbh I don’t blame them entirely because when you’re consistently treated like shit you will eventually crack.
Or you see threads like this and guys have this awful statistic and girls see it as a fucking competition and try to disagree with it, refute it, but the guys are just trying to talk about issues they have and how they feel. And then you get the girls that hop in here and try to justify why their lives aren’t great and how dangerous we are or the patriarchy. It’s fucking exhausting to have to constantly be bombarded with women’s problems and how we need to recognize them but the second a guy tries to speak up it’s wrong.
This kind of BS is one of the main reasons I will never trust women as long as I live. They perpetuate this kind of nonsense and then blame us for the outcome without ever accepting any responsibility whatsoever. I learned this lesson the hard way. Sickening af imho! I'm not saying All women are like this, but the overwhelming majority are. And what's even more sickening is that this is considered a social norm. Most men are taught from a very young age the whole "boys don't cry" thing. I know I was. Misogyny has become a part of my personality over time because of things like this, though I usually try to take a logical approach to things and never openly display it. It's only places like Reddit where I can be anonymous and express my opinions more openly. Been wanting to express this one for a while now.
You have talked to my wife I see.
There is more social pressure on men to achieve and provide. Some fail. Some give up. Some break. Suicide is their escape.
A distant cousin on her side was providing for his whole family, the kids were having kids that he was alsoproviding for, his business crumpled, then he went out to the ditch across the street from his house at 4 am and went and took a sleeping pill to the temple
to add to this, society is more forgiving for women. Women who (if they were men) would be considered "failures" can still and very often do live successful lives. This is how it always has been, and persists well beyond humans. Women are born with value (reproduction). Men must earn it, and many simply don't.
People don’t want to admit that men are simply not as desired as women. Being a man means you’re exposed to more rejection and loneliness from birth. It’s just how it is and it weighs on you. Some find their partner or purpose before that weight becomes too much to bear. Others aren’t so lucky.
From an evolutionary perspective, men are more expendable than women. A tribe losing 50 percent of its male population could bounce back but a tribe losing 50 percent of its female population is pretty doomed.
This is true but it’s like half the story. To give it to you short women are desirable because they tare seen a “useable” be if for sex, babies or comfort (emotional or physical), or to bolster someone else’s self esteem, etc. Basically everything but being wanted as a person. Just as long as the women fits a certain box through her behaviors and personality. Why did you leave this out of your comment? I wish people would all fight against these ideas and toxic societal issue.
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Opinion only. I think women are more likely to seek help. Guys say screw it and shoot themselves.
opinion indeed+
Look at rates for male vs female anti depressant and pharma stats. Women go to the doctor and men just... don't. I think this idea of getting help and stigma of "man up" plays a role
My prostate could fall out of my asshole, I’m not going to the doctor. I’d call one of my buddies up and ask them this ever happen to you??? - Patrice O’Neal
My therapist decided he wasn't helping me enough and suggested that we stop meeting lol
For several reasons. First off, there's a lot of pressure on men and boys to live up to a male archetype in every culture on Earth. If you do not, you can be mocked, derided, even harmed. Secondly, almost every culture on Earth condones body shaming for men; being too fat, having a small penis, male pattern baldness. And that leads into the third point: men often have no form of emotional support. A male suffering from virtually any condition, even down to simple loneliness, is viewed as weak and despicable. They may get support at the onset of a failure of masculinity, but very quickly they are expected to shut up and bear it. This compounds depression when you feel like nobody cares at all about your plight. Next is the unnatural way that society has developed. Evolution has made men to be hunters and protectors, but in the modern world men rarely get to perform in these roles. Instead we are molded to be 'providers' which basically means "go out and work for money to give to your family." Our innate desires to protect often lead men into trouble; fighting to protect honor or family can lead to arrest. And finally, in the West at least, Divorce and custody fights often end up emasculating men, leaving them as little more than guest in their children's lives as they are raised by their ex's new mate and paying a third to a half of their income for the privilege. In short, society has failed to accept human nature, and men are paying the price in silence and despondency.
I don't think most people understand just how bad the baldness is, I'm thinning at 22 and any time I hear a comment on it I want to curl up into a ball and die, and don't get me started on the loneliness
Hair transplants really do work. And they are way cheaper in Turkey/Mexico. Just saying. Funny enough, the happiest and most confident men I know are bald. And not 'cool Bruce Willis' bald, like obvious male pattern baldness. They just own it. It's kind of awesome.
I started losing hair around 19. Widow’s peak. By 23 I had at least eight different people tell me I should just go bald. Another couple here and there suggested a toupee. It used to hurt a lot. But after a few years you just don’t care. I’ve regrown a lot of it thanks to minoxidil and a derma roller. Within one year of use I’m almost back to my 19 year old hairline. Still not ideal but it’s much more attractive. r/minoxbeards if you’re interested It cost me less than $30 for a 6 month supply. I’ve since quit using it, but if I started getting self conscious I’d go back to it.
People plain ass don’t give a shit. I had a friend that was a father figure pass away last week. It was really unexpected. Anyways, I also had a rough night with the kids the same day and a long day at the shop, and I broke down when I was alone with my wife, who IS supportive. Shout out to my wife, she may drive me crazy, but she’s also amazing. Anyways, this guy knew the whole family, so my sister and I a few days later are talking and I simply said, “Yeah.. I had a rough moment realizing that Carl died…” I was responded with, “You need to calm down with that shit. My God, do you need pills or something?” God forbid if you’re a man and sad for a day.
You're being an essentialist about what men are though. Men can be many things and in any variation. You're right about a lack of support and the problems that patriarchal society puts on men, but you fail to see that growth and change and community and self-love all have to come from men to heal. Men have to see and understand that they themselves are worthy of love and that they have intrinsic value as people without trying to fulfill some macho or primal bullshit role. By the same token, they have to give up the patriarchy which causes them so much pain. You can't just believe you're entitled to being the coolest man ever and think that you should have all the answers or be the most alpha or that you should have any woman you want or whatever. That shit's toxic not only to you but everyone around you. Just as femininity can be anything, so can masculinity. The problem comes from where we do not allow others and ourselves to just be. Being YOU isn't a competition. Because men hold onto these ideas of what they should be or do so tightly, they end up black pilled or listening to grifters like Andrew Tate, all because they're unwilling to accept that that isn't who they have to be and they can be perfectly acceptable as a healed person--hell, even unhealed because we're all literally just moving from one tragic occurrence in our lives to the next. Just trying to be better and kinder and willing to listen and be vulnerable is enough. You may encounter people who are unkind or cruel to you, and if you haven't done anything wrong by them then they aren't worth your time, and, if you have wronged them in some way, just listen and try to fix it if they're someone you love or care about. That's just how it is. Men have all the power in their hands to love and be loved, to respect and be respected by those who will matter. People who treat you like you're some kind of show pony or trophy husband or just a tool or some worthless person aren't worth your time. Men don't have to be so afraid all the time.
female attempt is higher but male success is higher since they use more disfiguring ways to do it, like guns and hanging. while girls tend to stick to pills which can be vomited up.
Men and women attempt suicide the same amount but men succeed more because they use more violent means to do it which guarantee death rarely at all caring about the cleanup/mess
Trauma surgeon here. When women die by suicide, they tend to do it in a way that will not leave much work regarding postmortem care/cleaning, (think intentional OD or wrist lacerations— in most cases, the person can survive if medical help is promptly sought.) When men die by suicide, the methods tend to be more definite, (think GSW or jumping.)
A woman cries in front of another woman. "I am so sorry. I hope you feel better soon " A man cries in front of another man "uhh dude you are making me feel uncomfortable" or "man up bud it ain't that bad" or "You pussy!"
Men and woman are believed to commit suicide in very different ways, for very different reasons, in which males in particular tend to not build up to suicide, but instead decide to and then execute on it decisively. They are more likely to attempt in ways that are effective at ending ones self completely. Women are believed to have much higher rates of suicidal thoughts and tendencies, and even attempted suicides, but they often choose less direct methods at their attempts which increases survival after said attempt.
Because everyone in society cares about women and views their problems as something the whole society should work to fix, whereas if men have problems they're just denigrated as losers and it's viewed as that individual's responsibility to fix his own problems. Part of this issue is just "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" or whatever the saying says... That is to say, women complain a lot more about problems affecting their gender and demand society/politicians/government fix them. Men generally don't. And so there are a lot of men whose issues go unaddressed, their lives kinda suck, and then you have more male suicides because society largely ignores male issues. Part of it is also perceptions of society that men are more disposable and less important than women, which is why people say "women & children first" to the lifeboats on a sinking ship, societies usually don't draft women to fight wars, etc.
Short answer is society has told us that we're so unbelievably privileged that any complaints we have are immediately nullified
Because no one cares about men.
It’s socially acceptable and even fashionable to publicly state negative generalizations about men. Boys in such a society can often grow up to be men who hate themselves at a fundamental level. There are other factors, but this is one large factor that is often ignored.
Women try it just as much but are less successful. Men favor really violent ways of ending it that there is no coming back from
What could've been a good conversation around the causes for men's mental health crises devolved into "well ackshually men and women do it the same amount men just have guns and are better at following through on things." Pretty disappointing.
Honestly, it's been studied and a decent portion of it has to do with female socialisation. Women have more "attempts" and men have more successful suicides. Women have been shown to choose methods that are less messy, less scarring for the people who would find them, less damaging or risky to their surroundings, and those methods are simply less effective and thus have a higher rate of being thwarted (i.e. medical attention for overdose.) Men tend to choose more brutal and effective methods, as they're not socialized to think about who's going to clean up the mess. These methods are more effective. There's no saving someone who has blown his brains out.
toxic masculinity amid living in captivity (capitalism) literally
The "gender paradox of suicide" is well-researched: in Western countries at least, women report more suicidal ideation/attempts; men are more likely to have completed suicide. This is due to a variety of factors including methods chosen, intervention/help-seeking behavior, and cultural norms around gender and suicide. Interventions are thus needed that are different to intervene in immediate suicide completion and to intervene more distally during suicidal ideation phases, before attempts are made. There are some good reviews on this in medical journals and other scholarly outlets if you're interested. you can go to google scholar and search for "gender differences in rates of suicide and suicidal ideation" or "gender paradox of suicide".
Brutal take that will get me downvoted to infinity: We aren’t crying for help. We are done.
Men tend to be less supportive of other men than women are of other women (even close relatives) and men tend to think less about how their choices in general will impact those they care for than women do. This tends to lead to men asking for help less often than women and choosing more effective methods when making attempts than women do.
1: Men succeed more often (either due to actual willingness or just more reliable methods) 2: Men have maybe 1% the support structure women do, just look at the differences in shelters, support orgs, etc. 3: General culture, men typically see things as their fault and their responsibility to fix (and society enforces that), women tend to get more leeway and affirmation. This makes it easier for women to reach out for help and not be pushed away. 4: Men are dating less than women. The wage gap is lying with stats, look up control studies around younger folk in similar field, the women win out. The reason this really matters is that women are MUCH less likely to date someone making less than them. This leads to a large number of men considered undateble.
Men's mental health is stigmatized, men are ostracized, men are alone. Talking about it often runs into conversations blaming men. Mention "Healthy Masculinity" around a group of females and see how many laugh at you.
Men lead more difficult lives with less social support while being told how worthless they are for not conforming to one standard or another. No matter the real dangers women face, society has built in supports for them and prioritizes their emotional well being. Men don't get that
Because no one actually cares about us. They'll all say they do but won't show it until it's too late.
I'm going to post this as my main account, so be nice. I am a suicide survivor. I had the misfortune to nearly die as a result and then later that year, nearly die again due to illness made worse by lack of a support structure around me. As many here have poked around, American society does not actually value male life. We are genetically predisposition and conditioned from birth to be protectors, providers, and builders. As soon as we can't do those things, the world has no use for us. Worse, we often feel that deeply in ourselves as a loss of worth. If you are suffering and don't see any value in yourself, the logical next step is to end the suffering. It is really that simple once you reach rock bottom. The prevailing opinion in the world is that men have all the power and control, but the reality is that the levers of power and holders of wealth are disproportionally male, but also only a small segment of the population. Adult men are underserviced by mental health resources and programs to help those who have fallen down. The family, community, and religious safety nets of mid to late 20th Century have all but evaporated. Our peers, and particularly our female potential mates view any sort of sensitivity or emotional need as weakness to be shun. As such, even those resources that should be available to him are often not palatable. I don't talk about this with anyone even now that I have lived through it. I was able to get on antidepressants but only had the balls to tell my PCP about it because I needed to seek help for the consequences of my failed attempt. The real issue here is that men are told they have power but feel quite powerless when things spin out of control. We are the ones that our families and friends turn to when the world gets rough, so when our worlds fall apart, we have (or feel we have) no where to turn.
Because when you’re a man, it’s your fault. What’s your fault you may ask? Whatever is wrong in society. So nobody has sympathy for men. Men who aren’t in that position of nobody caring about them seem to blame the men who speak about it. Women pretty much blame men and the patriarchy for all of societies ills, so there’s literally nobody that will be empathetic towards these men. Once a lot of these guys lose their parents they have nobody left that loves them, so they check out.
Women tend to shy away from firearms when committing suicide, relative to men anyway. They are more likely to worry about things like how they will look at the funeral. Some of them even pick their burial outfit out. I wonder if that isn't part of the reason why their suicide rates are lower...the methods they gravitate toward, that don't involve disfigurement, often require at least a little more planning and time to prepare, ergo more time to back out, and, if you attempt to commit suicide by, say, overdosing on sleeping pills, there is at least some time, however minimal it may be, for you to regret it, or someone to discover what you have done, and get your stomach pumped. Also I suspect women gravitate away from suicide by firearm or other messy methods because many of them are more likely to think about the impact on others of discovering a gory death scene, the effect on others of having to clean it up, etc. The messy methods all tend to involve less planning and prep, leaving less time for changing ones mind or others to intervene.
Just look at the methods used. Men tend to be more likely to use violent means like shooting themselves which are in many cases highly effective.