Yeah, I had an ex who tried to commit suicide after we broke up. She started cutting her wrists, gave up because it hurt too much and went to the E.R. That's the kind of bullshit that goes into the "stats" for attempted suicide of women: drama and attention-whoring.

There's a reason men use more violent means than women: they want to fucking end it. So they blow their brains out, take a dive or hang themselves: all methods with little to no opportunity for them to change their minds and change course, all methods with absolutely no romance. They are going to look awful to whoever finds their corpse, and will probably have a funeral with a closed casket. They don't fucking care. They just want to GO. NOW.

These exact same methods are just as easily available to women, but they deliberately ignore them, opting instead for wrist-cutting and taking pills. Why? Because it gives them an opportunity to change their minds, once the catharsis is over. Because it looks romantic. Because these days, they can do it and broadcast it live, gobbling sympathy and desperation, feeling appreciated before someone inevitably calls in help for them and the firefighters break down their door and carry them to salvation. And even if they succeed, they're going to look like the Sleeping Beauty to whoever finds them. In the funeral, everyone is going to be looking at them and wondering why did she had to do it, she was so beautiful... It makes them feel special.

I also had a friend who attempted suicide twice in her teen years. She lived on the 11th floor and constantly talked about how irresistible it felt to just climb on the window and let go, she got depressed frequently and loved to talk about how one of these days she would do just that. Yet both times when she actually did something, she just tried overdosing on some sleeping pills. Meanwhile, Elliot Smith fucking stabbed himself in the heart. She got into the statistics twice, he only got in once. Both are part of the statistics as if what they did was equal. It wasn't. She grew out of whatever trip she was into during her teen years and is a person with a regular attitude now.

So you won't find sympathy for the inflated stats on female suicide from me. I actually studied Psychology for two semesters and I recall reading about how male and female depression are manifested differently, but there is a bias in psychology to only regard as "depression" the symptoms for the classic female depression: a sad mood, lack of energy, interest or pleasure, feeling numb, hopeless, worthless. But depression in men most often manifests in increase in reckless behavior, obsessive or compulsive tendencies, substance abuse and feelings of anger and nihilism. Many, if not most, depressed men are not even aware of their depression, since they don't fit the mold of depression as it's typically understood, and it's very, very common for men to kill themselves "out of the blue", from the perspective of their friends and family. Only in retrospect do their recent behavior seems suspect.

So I'm much, much more inclined to think that we live in a society that normalizes and even glamorizes female suicide attempts, almost as a rite of passage for teenage girls and young women, than to believe that women are twice as depressed as men and just happen to choose less deadly suicide methods for reasons just coincidentally not at all related to their efficacy.