Not really that odd.
Women consider the mess. Men don’t. They don’t want to be a mess left behind for someone else to have to clean up.
They also consider who is going to find them and how it might affect them. They don’t want their family members or friends walking in on the grisly scene of a bloated hanged body or brain splatter on the wall.
Even in what should be or is their final moments women still think of everyone else before themselves.
That means their choice of suicide is going to be more passive and slower acting. Pills. Poison. More time to be found. More likely to be saved. More likely to survive because you didn’t take enough.
The obvious possible exception is slitting one’s wrists in the bathtub. Two problems with that one though. Under the obvious state of duress, they forget to turn the water off before they cut and they can’t after because their hands aren’t working. They also tend to drink or take pills to numb the pain, so they’re not thinking clearly anyway. Secondly, for the longest time nobody knew how to do it. Movies showed slashes wrists horizontal so that’s what women did because that’s what they had seen; that way takes longer to bleed out.
So running water, maybe crying out when you slash, and cutting the wrong way also increased the likelihood you would be found and saved in the end.
Women get help more too. 60% of American women over 40 are on antidepressants, one study said. That tracks with my anecdotal experience. I’m 51. Well over half of everyone I know in my own age cohort is on some sort of antidepressant or mood stabilizer. Not all of them are prescription meds. A lot of these women rely on holistic teas and St. John’s wort, etc. If you add natural or homeopathic remedies, I’d say 90% or more of the women I know in my age group are battling, at least periodically, significant bouts of depression. 75% have expressed suicidal thoughts, easy.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say that women used to be more successful than men killing themselves, statistically speaking. Women used to be jumpers and drowners more. But places to jump became popular and so were roped or fenced off to prevent suicides. Wells and certain access to places to drown were also secured. Eventually, those methods fell out of favor. It’s odd how suicidal people tend to find themselves going to the same places over and over again to end their lives. Japan even has a suicide forest, or so it’s been said. Niagara Falls and certain bridges were quite popular for jumpers.
Regardless, wen are still trying 3 to 5 times more than men. Your statement that it’s not really a man’s world because men eat bullets instead of pills is ridiculous. It’s a man’s world. Look at the attempts. Look at the stats on who’s on more antidepressants. Who’s in therapy more? Who’s been hospitalized for severe depression more?
Ultimately, the reason women are less effective boils down to the fact that most suicide attempts, male or female, are spontaneous decisions after long periods of unrelenting depression. The urge hits suddenly and you just do it, but you’ve been thinking about it in general for a long time.
If that were not the case, I think men would have a really hard time keeping up statistically. Or, imagine if during that depressive time more women actually “shopped" for their suicide and had what they needed set aside “just in case". It’s really easy to kill yourself, once you get away from the symbolic nature of certain suicide choices. Insulin is easy to get black market or from a relative. Fentanyl, so easy. Very easy to make yourself a chloroform batch to ingest. And that’s just of you want to be comfortable at home.
I also suspect we miss a lot of attempts or successes and label them as something else. Accidental overdose, workplace accident, etc. Whether or not those are enough to change statistical outcomes, I doubt anyone could truly say.
