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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Curious about the huge disparity between male/female suicide rates in > 75 age group.

http://i.imgur.com/BAMSfbT.png

I'm curious about this as well, but it seems that the disparity is fairly constant and not just extreme for ages >75. The rate for men is over 4x that of women for ages 15-24 and over 3x that of women for ages 25-44.

There seems to be a variety of possible explanations for the difference [0] (which is common across several countries). One of them is that cultural male gender roles make seeking help a shameful thing, so males are less likely to seek assistance for suicidal thoughts [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-003-0397-6#/...

that age group was particularly interesting because I would assume men and women in that age group would face the same exact pressures. So the usual explanation of 'men are forced by society to be successful which drives them to suicide' won't be applicable.

Right, but over age 75 one would expect both men and women to be facing the same pressures of potentially (a) stopping work and (b) losing a spouse due to death. It appears that both of those can disproportionately affect males in our culture as men are pressured to work hard and provide for their family [0] and when a spouse dies, men do not have the same "social and familial connections" as women for support [1].

[0] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-003-0397-6#p...

[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/352844

They don't face the exact same pressure [1]. Men in this age group worked outside the home, a lot of blue collar jobs. Jobs they cannot perform anymore due to their age. Women more often worked in caregiver roles (more traditionally female occupations like nurses, teachers, etc.) or in the home. The men need to pivot to find fulfillment/satisfaction in life. The women just change who they're caring for (grand children and great grandchildren instead of their own children, or students, or patients).

I suspect that it's significant that the number of suicides over age 75 for men has dropped in those 15 years. Either reflecting a better quality of life, or a change how men are able to find satisfaction post-career.

[1] Ok. I'm making assumptions based on "traditional" gender roles here. But given the age group in question, I feel its justified. The division between male and female roles is far more present in those over 75 than the current working generations. This will change as the population ages, and be less applicable in 20-40 more years. But it's still applicable to this group today.

One really sad thing I've read about older people is what happens when their spouse dies. According to studies, the way men and women handle this is very, very different.

For women, when their husband dies, it's almost no big deal for most of them. They just continue on with their social group, and they can live for decades.

For men, when their wife dies, they usually die very quickly after (and not usually by outright suicide either).

Only if sexual inequality were a myth would you expect the figures to be the same.

A thing often missed when talking about this, is the reaction from health care when men breaks the gender role and do seek help, they are less believed by health professionals than if a woman was seeking help. It should not be very surprising that people who break gender roles are treated differently, but it has quite impact given the vulnerable situation.

This seems to be true across a few different high-income countries too. (When you look at low income countries there's still a difference, but it's much less[1])

So far things it might be are:

1) similar levels of attempts between men and women, but with men chosing more lethal, less survivable methods

2) women talk about their emotions more and thus people spot their signs of distress earlier

3) stigma means men don't seek help

4) men just don't seek help, but not because of stigma

There's big pushes on men to get them to talk more, which is good but misses the point. There has to be some service there for them to use, and I'm not sure those services exist or are good enough. And many men are in the care of specialist mental health services when they die by suicide, so they've already asked for help.

Older people have very high rates of suicide. But it tends to be masked a bit because older people are at increased risk of death from a bunch of other causes too.

[1] http://www.who.int/gho/mental_health/suicide_rates_text/en/

men don't deal with aging as well as women do. cranky old man syndrome is a very real thing

Heh. I've seen this at family gatherings, my grandmother would be happily mingling with everyone and entertaining young kids while my grandpa would be grumpy in a corner.

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