all the girls have scars on their wrists

Depression is twice as common in women as in men, I'm sure that affects attitudes about suicide.

If I ever tried to kill myslef, I'm sure I would wimp out and go for vodka and pills, or something sketchy like that that would likely leave no more than vomit stains on the carpet.

I have an old friend whose mother killed herself with a gun. His comment: "She must have been really unhappy. Women never do that."

none of it's very practical. Which part do you mean?

xpost - I suspect that the number of men who "play with guns" is small enough to be statistically insignificant in this.

Trying to kill yourself in a non-messy way.

Suicide Deaths, U.S., 2001*

Suicide by firearms was the most common method for both men and women, accounting for 55 percent of all suicides.

More men than women die by suicide.

The gender ratio is 4:1.

73 percent of all suicide deaths are white males.

80 percent of all firearm suicide deaths are white males.

No annual national data on all attempted suicides are available.

Other research indicates that:

there are an estimated 8-25 attempted suicides for each suicide death; the ratio is higher in women and youth and lower in men and the elderly.

more women than men report a history of attempted suicide, with a gender ratio of 3:1.

Not true. Consider the UK. Most people - men and women - do not have access to guns. However, men still are much more likely to succeed at suicide attempts.

Therefore, the fact that men are more likely to succeed at suicide is clearly *not* because they are more likely to use guns, or more likely to have access to guns.

It pisses me off a little bit to hear twisty-turny tangents about the statistic on male suicide. Its disrespectful to the victims. Blaming gun ownership instead of looking at the motivation to use them, and saying it's effort for women to find ammo? Come on. It's just an area where men have it bad. But anyways, speaking of female behavior. The "more attempts/less success" with female suicide sounds like an example of a cry for help, with the expectation of getting attention and support. Using lighter methods because the intention is some outcome besides dying. If someone wants to die they are serious about succeeding, it is really not hard. There are so many ways and plenty of places to find information about it. Believe me if your mind is on it that seriously you will be giving that much attention to research. "Can't find ammo" my ass, it's in the yellow pages.

People with access to guns, kill themselves with guns. In the UK, only a tiny proportion of the population have access to guns.

I don't feel qualfied to comment on why women ATTEMPT more there, but don't succeed.

I don't see why there should be any difference between the UK and US in this respect.

I guess this is what I suspected, that women think about it, write about it, romanticize it more than men but actually carry it out less.

Guns=success half of the time in the US
At what rate do guns=success in the UK? I don't know. Do you?

(off the top of my head I'd guess that they would be more than 50% successful, because msot of the people with access to guns know how to use one properly)

(xpost obv)

Many depressed men may not seek counselling for social reasons.

Contributing Factors

* Many factors in women may contribute to depression, such as developmental, reproductive, hormonal, genetic and other biological differences (e.g. premenstrual syndrome, childbirth, infertility and menopause). [4]
* Social factors may also lead to higher rates of clinical depression among women, including stress from work, family responsibilities, the roles and expectations of women and increased rates of sexual abuse and poverty.4

Gender Differences

* Women experience depression at roughly twice the rate of men.3
* Girls 14-18 years of age have consistently higher rates of depression than boys in this age group.[5]

* Depression in women is misdiagnosed approximately 30 to 50 percent of the time.[12]
* Fewer than half of the women who experience clinical depression will ever seek care.[13]

xposts

It seems your problem is solved, or at least finished to the point where you need to take it to email if you have a problem with it.

As I've said absolutely nothing - directly or indirectly - to insult or diminish Martin's troubles, any upset he feels is simply not my responsibility. I'm sorry he thinks that he was attacked - but he quite obviously wasn't (as everyone else seems to have noticed), and I'm not going to be apologetic about something I didn't do.

The only 'argument' I want to win is the one where statements and beliefs are being attributed to me that I don't hold.

Clinical depression and being situationally depressed are two wholly different things. And "having suicidal thoughts" does not mark you as being clinically depressed. Nor, for that matter, does serious clinical depression mean you're obligated to think about offing yourself.

No one person has the premium on having depression: symptoms and manifestations are infinitely mutable within individual cases, and vary enormously from person-to-person. But major depressive disorders DO (though emphatically not in the eyes of those who genuinely suffer from them) have a certain market value with some groups of people. And these people who (likely) struggle with other illnesses and some less serious depressive-forms such as dysthymia, or come out of their depression within a measurable time, use the terminology of the truly imperiled to receive the help they need. And what's difficult about this is that it makes the truly, truly, depressed feel even more isolated (something like a thought of "If that person's depressed ... I must be insane ... "), and even more helpless that the language and systems that've been designed to help them are preempted by "lesser" illnesses. And as weird as it sounds, I think a fairly common symptom of CD is a certain ego-attachment to the idea of depression as personality trait. Like: because it's so integral to the sufferer's entity, the sufferer begins to enmesh their being with the depressed monkey on their back. I'm not a clinician - nor even close - and I don't know what this process is called, but I know from extensive experience that the net effect is often a weird defensiveness of the depression that isn't part of the person who suffers.

I also wanted to say (though I don't know that anyone here would argue with me) that a failed suicide attempt is 10000000x better than a sucessful one, and people who make cries for help rather than offing themselves quietly strike me as much the braver.

Often folks with conditions that are not depression, weird as it sounds, 'want' depression, convince themselves (and their doctors) that they have it, and take the proper attention and definition away from the people who really suffer. A really ugly and gross metaphor once offered to me is: "If you had a nameless and painful condition that required you to have your impacted bowels scraped out every day with a long-handled spoon, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to claim rectal-cancer instead of impacted-bowel-spoon disease?" And it would make things easier, except for the people who truly suffered from rectal-cancer.

xpost - I think of acknowledging someone's feelings as kindness, but you can call it "catering" if you prefer.

Interesting you mention this, Remy. Honestly, I've had to deal with my own so long I'm not really sure what kind of person I'd be were I magically cured somehow.

And I can rather sympathize with Martin. Though I'm doing better now than I have in years, were I a betting man, my chips would still be on depression leading to my death over anything else.

there are so many things i want to respond to on this thread, but...long thread. i had moderate-severe depression back in high school, and made some half-assed attempts to hurt myself that i didn't tell anyone about til years later, because i didn't want to be one of those people who were just trying to get attention. that seemed like it was thought of as a sort of weakness, and i had no interest in that sort of attention. i've always thought that if i want to die, i want to do so successfully, and in an especially low period, i figured out the chemistry of a varied drug cocktail that would get the job done (and yes, i'm female). it's the risk of it failing that would keep me from ever trying it, were i to feel suicidal.

but what i wanted to speak of was this 'wanting' depression. i have a serious and much misunderstood physical illness now, which is often misinterpreted as depression by lazy doctors. i get really defensive about this, because i know my own mind, and i know when i'm depressed. i don't want it because it's not true (though i certainly have quite a bit of dysthymia), and because it's denial of what's really going on, as frustrating and hopeless as reality may seem.

but there was a time when i wanted depression. i wanted any diagnosis that i could get that could get treated. i wanted a brain tumor, for god's sake. sometimes you feel helpless and out of control and beat down by whatever your affliction may be and yeah, you want a label, a treatment protocol, some measure of hope. but when it was clear what depression really was and that i knew i didn't have it, i was insulted when doctors assumed what was going on with me emotionally was the cause of my problems, rather than the result.

i'm not even sure what i'm saying, but thought i'd chime in.

Here's what comes with ADD: inability to pay attention. (Duh.) Poor performance at school or work. (This can easily lead even the smartest person to have a string of terrible jobs.) Trouble in relationships. (If you've ever dated an ADD person, you know them by their inability to commit not just to you, but to five minutes of their own time.) Poor impulse control. (I have always been known to say and do things that other people just won't say and do. This amuses more people than it annoys, but only because I'm so damn charming.) Money management skills that are even worse than the relationship skills, and owe a great deal to poor impulse control. (I am always dead flat broke. Always.)

This is not a recipe for a healthy, productive life. This is, in fact, a fairly rotten way to go about your days. There's an upside, I guess: ADD people are often pleasant, active, creative, good conversationalists, and the like. But the downside is pretty huge. Depression is part of your life if you're like me -- situational and episodic, but no less real. Work is a daily ordeal, love is reduced to just another impulse, and we won't even get into the amount of self-medication that classically happens.

I find myself now in a situation common to people with my condition. I have a terrible job, of course, because I can't hold a decent one. I was dumped yesterday on accurate charges of needing more care than she could be reasonably expected to give. I have been slightly drunk for about ten years. I need care and treatment as much as anyone I have ever known, and I include my friend whose mother killed herself with a gun. (He's awfully depressed. Surprise.)

I sympathize with Martin, and like him, but his shit isn't automatically worse than mine just because it's clinical depression.

Brilliantly! Unlike depression, which is multifaceted and difficult to medicate, ADD is a fairly simple brain malfunction. It's very much like hyperactivity in children. A few mild stimulants, and the difference is like night and day.

But remember -- I live in America. Bad job equals no medical insurance. And no medical insurance equals no medication. To get medication, I have to somehow bootstrap myself out of this hole I've dug for myself.

Are you in rehab at the moment, Aaron? It wasn't clear from your original post, and it hasn't been mentioned subsequently in the thread.

I just wanted to say that, if you are, I hope it's going okay for you.

See a sliding-scale therapist or clinic or get into the social services system if you have to. For meds, order online (often cheaper), ask for samples from your doc, or write the drug companies and ask them for help -- they need the good PR right now and may well oblige you.

Arrrgh.

that's great that meds work so well for you, kenan...some people with ADD are unresponsive to meds and have a really really hard time of it (a friend of mine, who can never keep a job and is a total mess). buuuut of course insurance can be a nightmare, and the latest meds are insanely expensive. some of the drug companies have programs for people with low incomes/no insurance...they may not be very easy to get hold of or get info about (because fuck knows the companies want to /seem/ all charitable but not actually help people in need), but they are out there, and i have even gotten a med paid for, once.

hi remy. i go anon sometimes, specially since i can't log in anyway lately.

Would it be rude to ask...?

In one typical case, a 17-year old boy who had often complained that his family did not love him injured his younger brother in a fight and was severely scolded by his parents for this act. Not long after this he got drunk and hanged himself outside his house. Another young man from a different island was ordered by his father to work in the family garden even after he remonstrated that he had other plans that day. After the family had left to attend a community celebration, he dug up the garden and then hanged himself. An 18-year old from still another island group committed suicide shortly before his graduation when his request for money from his parents went unheeded. One young man in his early 20s, who is representative of many others, took his life when his family refused to allow his marriage to a girl with whom he had been living for almost two years and who had already borne him a child. Another young man hanged himself after a prolonged drinking bout following the discovery that he had been making sexual advances towards a girl in the household who was classified as his "sister." Boys in their early teens have hanged themselves for similar reasons: one in anger at his mother for giving away a pet dog, another in shame and terror at injuring an uncle with a rock he had thrown, and a third for fear that he would be beaten for returning home late after watching video.

Even a cursory examination of the case data reveals that Micronesian suicides exhibit an etiology markedly different from that associated with suicide in the West. There is almost none of the chronic depression, the vague sense of meaningless of life, or even the despondency at failure in business or school that seems to play such a large part in suicides in other parts of the world.

interesting reading
more interesting reading

What I'm getting at is that the discussion of all these other contextual issues is basically cultural. It's interesting to see just how much difference is already apparent between the people on this thread; I don't actually think ANY of the things that Aaron talks about in his post upthread are necessarily related to suicide except in a high-index-of-coincidence-in-western-culture way. There are lots and lots of people who go through 'awful' experiences and don't commit suicide or even attempt it.

That's not to say I don't appreciate the sharing of personal experiences and narratives on this thread because that's all got a tremendous amount of value, but there are already people doing science on this, and approaches to suicide are usually cultural and learned (like most social customs) laterally, from you peer group.

Personally, I have never learned to tie a noose. Also I would like to point out that using any over-the-counter medication in an overdose attempt or even in combination with alcohol will just result in extremely painful vomiting and dry heaves.

Except not anymore, really!

also, in many cultures, cancer is considered a stigma-bearing disease. for instance, there is a major pr initiative underway in new york city to convince asian-american residents to not under-report or otherwise stigmatize cancer.

Greatest country in the world, isn't it. The low end of the sliding scale at the last person I saw was $50 for one visit, and I was broke with no job! Here in small town USA I called up the county health department, and they said well, we have one doctor on staff for people with no insurance. But she isn't taking any new patients, so sorry, we can't help you. They suggested I call some religious charities. (I didn't.) DIY in the ownership society, fuck yeah.

I don't know how much I believe in suicide as cry for attention concept. Not to offend anyone. But failing suicide makes you feel like a fucking failure.

Kenan's posts in this thread are hitting me pretty hard.

cutters are sessy

abbott, i don't follow.

the place that aaron was writing from, kind of sounds like the kind of place that'd push a guy over the edge, you know? not the ideal environment for anyone.

Thought this was gonna be a thread revive zinging my taste in women

All this thread really convinces me of is that some people are stupid. Also, that discrip of ADD is possib the clearest, most convincing Kenan post I can remember ever reading.

Abbott, I completely agree. It reminds me of people claiming:"Well, the criminal wanted to get caught so he made those mistakes." Wah? In the latter I think it's about arrogance/sloppiness. Of course with a failed suicide attempt that isn't the same, it's just about a failed attempt.

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f86/igotabeefpastry/suicider.gif

(wild applause)

I did that years ago. Two years.

retro-applause, then.

"this is THE END" :-D

All this thread really convinces me of is that some people are stupid. Also, that discrip of ADD is possib the clearest, most convincing Kenan post I can remember ever reading.

I didn't feel it so negatively. I think there's a lot of interesting points being made, by intelligent people.

I still think it'd be interesting to have a 'mental history' of yourself thread.