Content advisory: I talk about my experiences with suicide below. If you're thinking about suicide, please get help by talking to a friend or making use of the many suicide prevention resources out there.
I'm male and I almost committed suicide earlier this year. (I still have suicidal thoughts, but I'm doing mostly better now, and I'm getting plenty of professional help.)
This is anecdotal speculation, but I wonder if another contributor to the gender discrepancy is that men are more likely to deal with compulsions and other "demons", and thus are more likely to want to kill themselves out of shame. That's sort of a vague and hard-to-measure claim, but I think it's pretty well-established that testosterone increases risk-taking behavior, and I imagine that includes addictions/compulsions as well.
In my case, I am/was a sex addict (or sexual addict) and I had been fighting for years with compulsions that caused me to mistreat women, even friends who I deeply cared about. I did feel deep shame and emotional self-hate, but my decision to commit suicide didn't happen due to overwhelming emotion, it was a (mostly) calm and solid decision that my situation was hopeless and that my death would make the world a better place. When I was making plans, my main focus was to make sure that I would actually die, and I had plenty of time to work through the details. I ended up changing my mind at the last minute, but I just as easily could have gone through with it.
I don't really know how common my type of situation is, but it's at least one example of a reason for suicide that I believe affects men much more than women.
That said, I believe I've heard that suicide is most commonly caused by depression rather than shame or other factors, but I don't know how reliable those findings are. It seems like something that's potentially hard to measure. At the very least, it would be interesting to try to explore how the motivation for suicide varies across genders.
I'm male and I almost committed suicide earlier this year. (I still have suicidal thoughts, but I'm doing mostly better now, and I'm getting plenty of professional help.)
This is anecdotal speculation, but I wonder if another contributor to the gender discrepancy is that men are more likely to deal with compulsions and other "demons", and thus are more likely to want to kill themselves out of shame. That's sort of a vague and hard-to-measure claim, but I think it's pretty well-established that testosterone increases risk-taking behavior, and I imagine that includes addictions/compulsions as well.
In my case, I am/was a sex addict (or sexual addict) and I had been fighting for years with compulsions that caused me to mistreat women, even friends who I deeply cared about. I did feel deep shame and emotional self-hate, but my decision to commit suicide didn't happen due to overwhelming emotion, it was a (mostly) calm and solid decision that my situation was hopeless and that my death would make the world a better place. When I was making plans, my main focus was to make sure that I would actually die, and I had plenty of time to work through the details. I ended up changing my mind at the last minute, but I just as easily could have gone through with it.
I don't really know how common my type of situation is, but it's at least one example of a reason for suicide that I believe affects men much more than women.
That said, I believe I've heard that suicide is most commonly caused by depression rather than shame or other factors, but I don't know how reliable those findings are. It seems like something that's potentially hard to measure. At the very least, it would be interesting to try to explore how the motivation for suicide varies across genders.