Study on suicide notes an increase among middle-aged women but ignores men

Submitted by anthony on Tue, 2008-10-21 16:55

Article here. Should I be surprised there's no mention that men still make up the majority of suicides? Excerpt:

'The number of women committing suicide has increased dramatically over the past decade and is driving up the nation's suicide rate as a whole, a new study finds.

The rate of suicide in the United States has risen for the first time in a decade and, for once, middle-age women are being looked at as the culprit driving the increase, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy.

The overall suicide rate rose 0.7 percent over the study period, but increased 3.9 percent for middle-age white women and 2.7 percent for white men in the same age group.'

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Comments

The kind of tunnel vision that the subject report displays is not the kind I am going to go along with. That is to say, it discusses an increase in suicides among a certain particular class of person but doesn't talk about the already unacceptably-high rates for others. That is a big omission and it exposes the underlying women-are-more-valuable attitude (there's that word again: "nymphotropism") that society has.

However it is callous in either case to read such an article and have only the thought, "Hey, why didn't they mention *whatever*?" That to me is the kind of thinking we get all the time from the feminuts, the incessant it's-always-about-me trash. And I won't go along with it.

This topic isn't about access to schools (which should be gender-neutral but are tilted toward women), jobs (again, same thing), or otherwise public services (same thing-- women's gyms, etc.). This is a matter of life and death. These middle-aged women are part of our lives as much as we are theirs. (At least for most of us. After all, we all had or will have a middle-aged mother around, yes?) So that this is a trend of increasing suicides among them ought to be disturbing and while this report is another example of this infuriating inability for so many people to see the irony in the level of concern or reporting coverage as compared to male suicide rates, it is also a fit response to be concerned about the reasons for this increase in middle-aged women's suicide rate.

I have some ideas of why it is going up. But before I chime in, I'll see what others might say. Promise to share later if a thread gets formed, thereby indicating a real interest in the topic.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2008-10-21 18:11

It's going up in part to stress of having to provide for themselves, less likely to find a stable relationship that mirrors their ego's ideal situation, failed to reach biological needs of being a mommy (imagine if a man pill where available), some other form of powerlessness and of course the biggest culprit as we all know is El Niño. A

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Submitted by Michael on Tue, 2008-10-21 20:40

This is a human rights issue.

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Submitted by anthony on Tue, 2008-10-21 21:55