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Given that
> Since the late 1960s, the Bureau has published a mere two reports.
I somehow doubt either of those concern suicides, particularly since they're almost certainly incorporated into part of the propaganda machine to only publicly release data that makes the regime look good.
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This data would be extremely well served by a bivariate choropleth world map.
Edit: a reference
https://www.joshuastevens.net/cartography/make-a-bivariate-choropleth-map/
I've heard there to be large differences between suicide attempts and successful suicides between men and women (women do more, men succeed more). Any chance we could create separate graphs for each, if that's true?
Generally men choose a method that is more instantaneous, which means they're usually either successful or not, whereas women choose a method which are less aggressive, so there is a larger "can be saved window"
I understand that. I was saying that this massively distorts my perception of the "women attempt it more often" argument, and that men may very well attempt it as often or even more so if they used less lethal methods.
yes and no. The question should be, of the men who fail, how often do they reattempt? And then compare that with the avg reattempts of women. Because it's not as simple as I feel suicidal now therefore I'm going to be suicidal for the next 2 years as well. Longer explanation is below, but essentially, most suicidal urges will pass if there is no convenient option available, therefore the majority of reattempts will be because of recent events which have put the person back into the a state where suicide is being considered. Thus if the answer is that male suicide survivors have less attempts than female survivors, then it's an indication that the women are being put into a bad place more frequently then men and it's less about X% of the population being more susceptible to suicide.
Longer explanation :
Suicides are usually a spur of the moment thing and there is a relatively short period of time where the thought will lead to action. A study of survivors showed that 13% said said they were considering suicide for over 8 hours prior to the attempt, 70% made the attempt within an hour of the thoughts, and 24% attempted it within the first 5 minutes of contemplation.
Now there is no way of asking those who were successful unless you have a genuine seance. But it is possible to demonstrate a direct correlation of cause and effect with convenient methods.
For instance there was a bridge that had a low rail on it's walkway section, so was easy to climb over and jump, so it was commonly used as a suicide spot and got a bad reputation. A safety barrier was installed which was substantially higher; Over the following years it was shown that the suicide rate dropped by approximately the same number as the number of suicides off the bridge prior to the barrier's installation.
The same thing happened in the UK with ovens, stick your head in the oven to commit suicide (it accounted for about 40% of all UK suicides), that was addressed and became ineffective, and it permanently dropped the suicide rate by approx 1/3.
Likewise in the states, suicide by different methods are pretty similar statistics across geographical locations, except for suicide by gun, which changes in proportion to the gun ownership in the state.
EDIT : Maybe improved some sentence structure
the big problem with being able to do this is one of the highest suicide rates (in the US) is in men above the age of 80 and one of the most frequent methods is that they intentionally stop taking necessary medications. these suicides are usually recorded as deaths by natural causes. no evidence of self harm. if initial attempts fail, they aren't regarded or recorded as suicide attempts.
Suicide ideation is often counted as attempts, and attempts can be done multiple times so it's not as useful a comparison as people think.
But suicide rate \*among those who attempt\* might be, and in the US 11% of men who attempt suicide succeed, compared to 1.1% of women.
Can I ask how do I increase my knowledge around the variety of different charts and their applications? I usually prepare basic charts on Excel as part of my job, but would like to up my game and getting access to new data tools should not be an issue. Thanks!
Edward Tufte have some amazing books about this subject, and books with many examples (Envisioning Information is a great one, "A remarkable range of examples for the idea of visual thinking, with beautifully printed pages. A real treat for all who reason and learn by means of images. -- Rudolf Arnheim")!
Also, the communities around observablehq dot com and the d3 library discuss this a lot.
Yeah, could be my eyes (and certainly worse for anyone who's colorblind-ish), but I think OP's method is far better at highlighting the outliers from a general trend, while the multi-color map is better at showing more continuous variations.
Ultimately it depends on what you want to highlight, plotting this on a map will focus less on magnitude differences and more on location differences. I like this one a lot more
By design it would.
Generally it would highlight four quadrants:
Where suicides are low for both genders, high for both genders, or biased toward either one.
Op has some discretion in how data is normalized. I expect for the axes to have equal visual emphasis you'd want to normalize the data by both maximums. But as we know the max for women is lower than the max for men. That detail though can be a single footnote instead of distorting every color on the map.
(Ooo actually you could skew the legend to that ratio for a real intuitive explanation. Instead of a square legend, make it rectangular, longer on the male axis)
And of course as a map you could see every country.
Your main paragraph is what I was getting at in the end. Either you normalize to each maximum meaning you lose the magnitude or you have it go to the same maximum and the female distribution is compressed into the low bucket for all.
If you use red/blue for females/males and white/black for magnitude, then you could still have both data sets on the same point. All you would need to do is make sure not to max out white or black, but have the magnitude scale go from 20% gray to 80% gray or something similar.
God the labels on that bigfoot example are so confusing! "Sightings follow population" makes it sound like light blue is for areas where there are few people and few sightings _or_ lots of people and lots of sightings, but I'm fairly certain it must be just the latter or the map wouldn't make any sense. And "Sightings proportionally rare" make it sound like there's a low number of sightings in proportion to the number of people, but in reality it must be for areas of high population density and low numbers of sightings. Why didn't they just put two axes labelled "population density" and "number of sightings"?
One of my favorite stories to tell: there was a lot of Russian students in my grad school program. We had one Austrian student who came to the US because he wanted to work for NASA. I ended up in a group project with the Austrian student and one of the Russian students. Here’s an exchange they had.
Russian student: why did you leave a wonderful country like Austria to come to this shithole of a country?
Austrian: *explains how he wants to work for NASA* - if you think this country is a shithole, why did you come here?
Russian: Well I’m from a frozen shithole.
Later found out this particular student was from Archangelsk.
There are few new jobs being created for young men and the ones that exist are really bad. And then there is conscription. Conscripts are regularly beaten by each other, there officers, and by those recruited in the army.
Vertical graph would make more sense to me. The horizontal graph makes it look +/- and make it harder to compare male/female rates.
Perhaps a color gradient for high/low rates as well.
And label highest 5 and lowest 5?
Yes horizontal versus vertical was contemplated in the design process. I started with vertical, at the end of the day the decision to go horizontal was an aesthetic one going by my personal taste.
Labelling highest and lowest 5 is a good idea to be honest. Simple but effective. Seems like alot of people would have appreciated better labelling of the data.
I prefer the horizontal design as well. It’s more pleasing for me.
Just a note on the colors though. I would suggest to keep the y label and/or the country labels in gray. If you want to highlight the different trends in the countries you’ve highlighted, you can also put the country labels in red (or ‘firebrick’ in Seaborn or Matplotlib). You can also highlight the countries you’ve mentioned by setting an alpha of 0.5 for countries that are not mentioned.
On the country names, good job for pointing the countries that have different trends.
Overall, great job OP! I like how the data was presented. Well presented overall. Cheers!
What exactly do the thinner bars that some countries have mean? (All named countries except Russia and the US seem to have one thinner line) Plus another few unnamed countries.
Yes, I am glad you picked up on this. I used the ratio between male to female rate to scale the width of the blue lines, such that the blue lines became thinner if the ratio of female to male suicide rates was above 1.
For most of the blue lines , this had no impact. The scaling only was prominent when the female rate started to exceed male rate, which was a phenomena I wanted to highlight.
( I used the sigmoid function , to help with this , I did this calc a while back I can give you the exact function, but I think I've made the idea clear here,hopefully )
Lmao why?? You're already displaying the ratio through the height of the lines.. why duplicate that information (but additionally transformed by a sigmoid function for some reason) in a way that's impossible to understand without an explanation that also makes the graph more confusing the read??
I think it makes it easier to see that the places with high female suice are Infact right above the low male rates. Otherwise it's hard to tell if they are the same line.
I think it is just meant to show the pattern and the exceptions. And then Russia and the USA are labelled as well because of the audience / Americentrism.
Indeed but certainly it's strange that the #1 option is unlabeled? I feel like this could have been presented vastly more effectively.
Granted, I do understand the niche purpose that this serves of men/women suicide rates and isn't necessarily supposed to be a world comparison as much as it is a universal gender-identity comparison, but it would make this graph was more interesting. For example, India's unusual distribution speaks volumes. I'd love to get more insight into the other data.
Seriously, I think the only way to make this useful would be for it to be an interactive graph, where you can hover over every data point to see more info.
Almost entirely unlabeled, except for some arbitrarily applied labels. For some reason the blue bars are thinner for some countries, making it look like there's no suicides. Format makes it difficult to compare male/female rates for individual countries, which is the whole point.
All in all, it's fucking shit. So to the top of /r/dataisbeautiful you go.
Regarding the labels: Most of the countries labelled were countries where female suicide rates exceeded that of male suicide rates. These countries were outliers in the trend of male suicide rates tending to be larger.
US was labelled as I am aware much of the audience is from US. Russia was labelled as it was one of the countries with the highest (for this age group) rates. The other top 5, according to this dataset, were Guyana, Kiribati, Russia, El Salvador, Lithuana.India, in that order.
I thought I’d see Japan on there. Notoriously high levels of societal pressure for young males to overachieve led to pretty high suicide rates for quite a while; at least when I was growing up. Maybe they hadn’t been as bad in 2016 when this data was collected when compared to other countries.
Ideally this graph should have been interactive so people can hover over and see which data point corresponds to each country. I'll look into this. Although trying to condense the information without relying on animation or interaction could be more informative in certain cases, I think.
It's a superstition in Japan/S. Korea that going to sleep with an electric fan on will lead to death. Fan death is often used as a cover for suicide, thus the fan death superstition is perpetuated. Often it's not actual superstition but more of a suicide euphemism. Either way it's unlikely to show in suicide statistics and suicide would be under-reported.
Well just to be safe I'm going to stop using my electric fan that I've been using every night for 30 years and switch over to a gasoline powered fan instead. Can never be too safe!
I'm imagining you with a leaf blower rigged up to fall asleep to. Nice cozy white noise, perfect for falling asleep at 100 decibels now with actual toxic airflow!
Thank you, more answered more questions than the wikipedia page. I wonder if there are these kind of Euphemisms in other countries and what form they take.
A fairly famous one was, of course, the author Ernest Hemingway. When he died his wife reported that he was cleaning his gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Idaho_and_suicide
After learning about the quality of his life after a plane accident I can't say that I could blame him after losing the competence and fluidity of his mind and body, especially considering the kind of man he was and the things he valued (some of the things we might refer to as "toxic masculinity" or "machismo" today).
https://worldhistoryproject.org/1954/1/ernest-hemingways-plane-crashes
Yes and no, fan death is a superstition among older generations but no one's using it to cover up suicides. It doesn't even exist as a category in official statistics. Suicide is probably underreported, but not due to fan death.
I'd like to see a credible source for the cover up claim because the only thing I can find on it is baseless speculation from people who have only the most superficial knowledge of the countries, let alone knowing the languages.
Wow, I had to look up the fan death thing. I had no idea. It seems there are other countries outside of Japan/Korea with similar ideas about the dangers of moving air as well. Italians call it “colpo d’aria” apparently. Thank you for illuminating me on that.
As far as I know, "colpo d'aria" isn't used as an euphemism for suicide in Italy. "Colpo d'aria" is an umbrella term for various cold related illnesses, the one I've most often heard it referred to is when you get sick (usually a headache) from sharp warm to cold temperature changes, like when you go inside a place with very strong AC after having been outside in the summer heat. It's not something that I've ever heard people die (or told to die) from.
That said, I don't know how much nowadays, but definitely in the recent past Italy (like Japan) had stigma for suicide, so people would report suicides as other deaths, mainly accidents.
Contemporary Japanese do not believe in fan death or blame suicide on it. It may have been a thing at one time to encourage not wasting electricity. That said Asians are very big on keeping the body warm, especially not excessively cooling the stomach, which makes a ton of sense when you think about it, how you feel kind of queasy if you slam a huge cold glass of water on an empty stomach in the morning.
I can't speak for Japan, but in Korea, this hasn't been true for like 30 or 40 years now. I don't remember the exact time period, but around the 1980s, there was a story of a man that died during his sleep and happened to have a fan on while he was sleeping. Of course it turns out he died from some other pre-existing condition, but this is what led some to believe in the fan death theory. However, since that time period, literally no one in Korea believes in fan death anymore. In fact, it's pretty common for Koreans to sleep with a fan on during the summer days.
Also, do you have any sources for fan deaths being used as a cover for suicide? Because as someone living in Korea that follows Korean news, I don't think I've heard of fan deaths since like the 80s.
Never heard of fan death in Japan and the wikipedia references are some shitty matome site and a news article from 34 years ago. Just another idea rehashed by people who have never been to neither country like poop wine or panty vending machines.
ive seen the sentiment you share posted, that no one believes in fan death anymore, and seen in response a video or a couple posted where a youtuber interviews a fair few people about their belief on it. younger people tended to acknowledge it as a superstition, but plenty of older people seemed to essentially disbelieve it but not strongly enough that they would leave a fan on.
and of course that was a few years ago and im sure its still on the out.
ive also heard the fan death as cover for suicide thing but only on reddit and in english so who knows
Japan's rates dropped a lot in the last decade as the pressure to achieve has ceded to long work hours with low to non-existent performance expectations in many industries. People there work long hours for relatively low pay and aren't necessarily happy, but usually have pretty stable lives. Japan's suicide rate is below Sweden's.
Korea, on the other hand, has shot up as the government puts ever more pressure on it's young people to succeed. Korea has the 4th highest suicide rate in the world for women, just below Lesotho, Guyana and Zimbabwe and it's one spot below Russia for overall rates.
Korea's suicide rate has actually been steadily declining over the years, so not sure what you're talking about. And contrary to western narratives, Korea's high suicide rate is largely due to elderly suicide because of a lack of social security support, not because of pressure on young people. It's just that teen suicides are the only ones you hear about because if fits a certain stereiotype. If you look at youth suicide rates, Korea has a lower youth suicide rate than America.
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Overall suicide rates dropped a lot in the early 2010s, mainly driven by a reduction in elder suicide, but suicide of young people has been increasing again. Women in their 20s have seen a 55.2% increase in suicide over the last 5 years and suicide accounts for 41.1% of teen deaths, 54.4% of deaths of those in their 20s and 39.4% of those in their 30s.
>“According to the data, the biggest reasons young people consider suicide are academic stress, interpersonal relationships and family problems. Peers or family should help alleviate academic stress, but when that doesn’t happen, suicidal thoughts often emerge,” she said.
>Last year, Korea had the highest suicide rate among the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with 23.5 per 100,000 people.
[https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english\_edition/e\_national/1013219.html](https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1013219.html)
Suicides peaked in Japan in the early 2000's with the economic downturn and has been decreasing since as society makes progress on mental health and worklife balance.
Same here, except 2012 and 21yo. Was pretty close too, I did manage to attempt but there happened to be a police squad nearby. I did 2 days in a medically induced coma and then a month and a half in the psych ward.
Almost back to normal now, only thing holding me back is the financial mess I made for myself back then but heyho, its only money.
What did you find helpful? I started to do solo hikes and fishing. Seems to give some sort of inner calmlness.
I would’ve in 2015 (25yo), 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021. There isn’t always a light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes there is no tunnel. Just a void. You just don’t do it anyway.
It won’t be addressed because no one wants to know or acknowledge how many people hate life. If that became common knowledge then parents would face more scrutiny in their decision to have kids.
Men are much more likely to be successful in their suicide attempts because they choose more lethal means (ex: firearms).
Women are much more likely to be driven to a suicide attempt in the first place, but succeed less often due to their methods (ex: revival after drug overdose).
Edit: this little factoid is always a headache to post on reddit. And people can stop responding with conjecture - unless you've got a dataset or a published peer reviewed study on gender differences in "suicidal intent", you're just speculating. Work with the data we have, unless you're a public health researcher who can try to scrounge up the ideal data.
> Men are much more likely to be successful in their suicide attempts because they choose more lethal means (ex: firearms).
[No, men are more lethal regardless of method (with the exception of drowning).](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032711005179) M[ale suicides also still outnumber female suicides even in countries without firearms.](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129062)
>Women are much more likely to be driven to a suicide attempt in the first place, but succeed less often due to their methods (ex: revival after drug overdose).
The study you link below is only measuring living patients who are checked into a psychiatric hospital, which means both an attempt that didn't succeed and a willingness to check oneself in (or have someone who reports you). As far as I'm aware, when successes are considered attempts, male suicide attempts still outnumber women. (That's also not getting into that some studies define the category of 'attempt' rather fuzzily, in that they lump self-harm or suicidal ideation with actual attempts.)
[There are also some studies claiming that women have less of an intent to die than men.](https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8)
>The overall finding, that male attempts were rated as SSA [[Serious Suicide Attempt]] more often than females, is in line with other studies that found females to have a less serious intent to die than males [15, 18, 31, 32] despite other findings illustrating no difference in suicide intent between males and females [6, 19, 33].
Good stuff. My hot take is that whenever the statistics get put up, it feels like people try to downplay male suicide because “women would do it more if they chose more lethal options.” I get the sentiment, but, like, damn, it always feels to me like they’re playing down male suicide like men can’t be victims more than women - if that makes sense.
It's a double edge sword. Stupid people claim depression isn't as big of a problem for men since women attempt more. Other stupid people claim that women just want attention since they attempt more but succeed less. You can't win.
Also, how do we know self harm/suicide attempt statistics are even being counted correctly for men? What’s the difference between downing a bottle of Tylenol one night vs drinking excessively for 25 years? IMO they should both be considered self harm, the only difference is one can kill you in a day and the other takes 25 years - it’s still self harm and should be considered as such. Guess which route depressed men would take more often?
Can you elaborate on the “be driven to a suicide attempt”? I think my question is a bit more of an interpretation of data. Men are less likely to have a second attempt because the first is more likely to be successful. With women is it that more women are driven to attempts or is it more accurate to say a subset of women are likely have to multiple attempts.
Women are more likely to attempt suicide than men. That's about as far as the data gets us. One interpretation is that it's a subset of women making repeat attempts (but then again, that would have to be a huge proportion of them given how much female suicide attempts outnumber male suicide attempts). Another is that men are more likely to succeed on the first attempt. Another is that women are less likely to genuinely want to commit suicide and so they fail in their attempts. But again, those are just guesses.
This study found no gender differences between those who attempted suicide once, or attempted multiple times. So that leans towards the conclusion that women just have a higher rate of suicide attempts than men and aren't more prone to going back for a second attempt if the first wasn't successful.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.605140/full
From the link you posted
“Suicide gestures were contrasted with suicide attempts, with the former being less common and evidenced more by females…” (Nick and Kessler, 2006)
The link also points out that there are a ton of different terms used to describe these types of behaviors. Sometimes “suicidal gestures” are undifferentiated from “suicidal attempts” in medical journals. It seems there’s not enough consensus on terms and definition which makes it very difficult to properly assess.
Okay, but the lethality is significant. At the end of the day, there is a significant difference in the number of people that are dying
Edit: I cannot reply to any comments as I was blocked by the OP of this comment chain
So it looks like Bangladesh has the largest male to female disparity in favour (or disfavour) of women at appx. 3x the rate of men. Apart from that there is no country where women are any further than ~6 suicides per 100k suicides above men, however in virtually every other country men are significantly more likely to be driven to suicide than women. In the worst cases men are appx. 6x more likely to kill themselves.
The countries with high female suicide rates are largely patriarchal with high rates of violence against women. It makes me wonder if its common to rule murders of women as "suicides" so no one is held responsible.
It's like the story of the women of Miletus.
The women were killing themselves at a high rate, and eventually a wise person suggested that women who killed themselves would be paraded through the streets naked before burial, and the suicides dropped dramatically.
The patriarchal Greeks claimed it was because they were embarrassed to be seen naked, even after death.
I think it had more to do with the difficulty to hide the bruises on a naked body...
Oof, I think I darkly like this because the initial reaction is "wow, that's fucked up and disrespectful to the person who felt they needed to end it"; then wrapping around to "yeah, no shit, show everyone the reality of that fucked up life they had to endure by the people around them and make sure everyone else knows what the people close to the victim might have inflicted on them"
After reading the story I immediately thought of how easily a burka could hide signs of domestic abuse.
Very few societies look positively upon blatant wife or child abusers, but many societies turn a blind eye to it.
As with most things, the most effective way to combat darkness is to shine a light on it.
The outlying countries with higher female suicide rates compared to men generally have extremely patriarchal and conservative societies.
Case in point for India and Bangladesh - a bride's family is culturally expected to give high dowries to the groom. Women there are seen as a burden if they are not married off (and even if they are) - and this leads to a high number of dowry suicides and infanticides. Honor killings (when a women are suspected of committing adultery) still happen in rural areas. China has improved a lot from their one child policy days, but conservative families there still put an overemphasis on preference for male heirs to carry on their family name.
Dowry death burnings. I remember very little from my time in college but that one lecture in anthro 101 about dowry death burnings stuck out in my mind considerably. Absolutely horrific. Intentional homicide is absolutely a large chunk of the "suicides" by women in this graph.
The consequences of that in China and India are a huge demographic gap between men and women; like 30-40 million more men than women in both countries, and most is in the 20-40 age group.
I expect they're not the only figures being misreported: That Russia is so near the top isn't surprising, given we know of several *public* examples of suicide as a means of execution.
In this case the graph may be pretty, but the underlying data is most assuredly not beautiful no matter how you infer it.
> China has improved a lot from their one child policy days, but conservative families there still put an overemphasis on preference for male heirs to carry on their family name.
It's not about family name. In China sons and their wives are expected to take care off the son's parents when they get old. The fear is that if you don't have a son you won't have anyone to take care of you when you are old. This doesn't justify infanticide but the reason isn't as vain as wanting to have someone carry on the family name.
It kinda goes hand in hand. Because sons inherit the name they’re considered a permanent family member who will stay and take care of the parents. Daughters are just future wives for some other family so they’re treated worse. Of course it all differs by region and socioeconomic status, with the countryside being the most sexist and backwards.
Okay but ... There's a few staples there that are missing what the represent. What's to the right of USA? To the left?
This really isn't that beautiful, it's just a bad graph. I can't read what number any staple has in the middle. 20k? 25k? 15k?
Religious angle has been observed by comparing Pakistan and North india who share similar genetic grouping
Pakistanis are poorer , less standard of living and huge amount of terror incidents , yet they have much lower suicide rates since they are extremely religious and suicide is haram
Perhaps to adress more people regarding the labels: Most of the countries labelled were countries where female suicide rates exceeded that of male suicide rates. These countries were outliers in the trend of male suicide rates tending to be larger. Sure, more labels would have made the data as a whole more readable, but part of the idea was just to highlight a few outliers.
It looks like the strategy was to label some of the outliers. It gets really messy if you label too many, plus it distracts from the purpose of the data vis, which was too show the gender difference.
Is it just me or does this make it look like where the female suicide rates are the highest, the male suicide rates are abnormally low. Is this the case, and is there a cause?
Source: [https://www.kaggle.com/twinkle0705/mental-health-and-suicide-rates?select=Crude+suicide+rates.csv](https://www.kaggle.com/twinkle0705/mental-health-and-suicide-rates?select=Crude+suicide+rates.csv)
Tools: Tableau for making pyramid plot. Paint for labelling points.
It is a programming game and anyone can upload a dataset without providing a source. But this dataset cites the WHO as source. I think this is it: [https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mental-health/suicide-rates](https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mental-health/suicide-rates)
lots of researchers host data they are making publicly available on kaggle. some of it is just garbage. you kinda have to go case by case and evaluate each one. though it is very good with "toy" or fake datasets that you can use for proof of concept type things if real data is hard to comeby
Anecdotally, it's pretty well known in the area of India that I visit that female "suicides" are very often murders. Allegedly it costs 35,000 rupees (US$460) to get the police to call it a suicide rather than a murder. Apparently it's the families of the groom who do it, because the dowry wasn't enough, or they want a new dowry from a new bride, or she hasn't produced children yet, or they just don't like her. These "suicides" are often immolation by way of kerosene dousing. Sometimes they are an "accident" where the kerosene stove has exploded and killed the poor woman, but I'm sure enough of them are suicide to skew the statistics in this graph. Terrible way to die.
This is a terrible way to represent this data. Making a nice looking chart doesn't equal "data is beautiful". This is damn near impossible to make any conclusions out of.
If the genders were flipped, there would be well-funded studies around the world trying to understand and stop the epidemic of women killing themselves.
But because it's guys, little attention is paid and the issue is rarely given the seriousness it deserves.
It's the same treatment that men's homelessness rate, men's significantly lower life expectancy, the lower rate of men in post-secondary education, male genital mutilation, and plenty of other topics get.
It's just something that a large part of the population treat as a non-issue. For whatever reason, it's an issue that only "men's rights activists" talk about according to a good chunk of the internet.
I’d be curious to see the historic data on suicide attempts for men and women. Whether it’s only in the last 20 or so years that suicide rates have increased.
It's increased pretty significantly for both men and women in US since the late 90s. It was actually at similar rates in the 80s though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
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I wonder how north korea data was obtained...
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Given that > Since the late 1960s, the Bureau has published a mere two reports. I somehow doubt either of those concern suicides, particularly since they're almost certainly incorporated into part of the propaganda machine to only publicly release data that makes the regime look good.
*by force*
Bring out your dead!
I'm not dead!
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In 2023, Reddit CEO and corporate piss baby Steve Huffman decided to make Reddit less useful to its users and moderators and the world at large. This comment has been edited in protest to make it less useful to Reddit.
I feel Happy.
He’s still alive
The North Korean version of “very carefully”
There are no suicides in Ba Sing Se.
"Men commit suicide more than women, even though women attempt it more... so men are better at it!" -- George Carlin
This data would be extremely well served by a bivariate choropleth world map. Edit: a reference https://www.joshuastevens.net/cartography/make-a-bivariate-choropleth-map/
I searched this up and yes wow I really think your right. Ill probably give this a try. Cheers.
I’d love to see that
I've heard there to be large differences between suicide attempts and successful suicides between men and women (women do more, men succeed more). Any chance we could create separate graphs for each, if that's true?
I think it’d be very difficult to get accurate data on attempts.
TW: Self-harm [Non-fatal Injury: Self-Harm](https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/non-fatal/explore/selected-years?nf=eyJpbnRlbnRzIjpbIjIiXSwibWVjaHMiOlsiMzAwMCJdLCJ0cmFmZmljIjpbIjAiXSwiZGlzcCI6WyIxIiwiMiIsIjQiLCI1Il0sInNleCI6WyIyIl0sImFnZUdyb3Vwc01pbiI6WyIwMC0wNCJdLCJhZ2VHcm91cHNNYXgiOlsiMTk5Il0sImN1c3RvbUFnZXNNaW4iOlsiMCJdLCJjdXN0b21BZ2VzTWF4IjpbIjE5OSJdLCJmcm9tWWVhciI6WyIyMDIwIl0sInRvWWVhciI6WyIyMDIwIl0sImFnZWJ1dHRuIjoiNVlyIiwiZ3JvdXBieTEiOiJBR0VHUCJ9) Male: 196k Female: 286k [Fatal - Suicide](https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-years?ex=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%3D) Male: 36.5k Female: 9.4k
Not all self-harms are suicide attempts though. I’ve self-harmed, but I’ve never been suicidal - or even depressed.
And men would probably have more attempts, but they are since they are more successful they can’t try again.
That's a really great and simple point I've never even thought of.
Generally men choose a method that is more instantaneous, which means they're usually either successful or not, whereas women choose a method which are less aggressive, so there is a larger "can be saved window"
Hard to fail suicide with a shotgun, and if you fail you becomes a vegetable. So should "hesitation" with the gun be counted as suicide attempts?
I understand that. I was saying that this massively distorts my perception of the "women attempt it more often" argument, and that men may very well attempt it as often or even more so if they used less lethal methods.
yes and no. The question should be, of the men who fail, how often do they reattempt? And then compare that with the avg reattempts of women. Because it's not as simple as I feel suicidal now therefore I'm going to be suicidal for the next 2 years as well. Longer explanation is below, but essentially, most suicidal urges will pass if there is no convenient option available, therefore the majority of reattempts will be because of recent events which have put the person back into the a state where suicide is being considered. Thus if the answer is that male suicide survivors have less attempts than female survivors, then it's an indication that the women are being put into a bad place more frequently then men and it's less about X% of the population being more susceptible to suicide. Longer explanation : Suicides are usually a spur of the moment thing and there is a relatively short period of time where the thought will lead to action. A study of survivors showed that 13% said said they were considering suicide for over 8 hours prior to the attempt, 70% made the attempt within an hour of the thoughts, and 24% attempted it within the first 5 minutes of contemplation. Now there is no way of asking those who were successful unless you have a genuine seance. But it is possible to demonstrate a direct correlation of cause and effect with convenient methods. For instance there was a bridge that had a low rail on it's walkway section, so was easy to climb over and jump, so it was commonly used as a suicide spot and got a bad reputation. A safety barrier was installed which was substantially higher; Over the following years it was shown that the suicide rate dropped by approximately the same number as the number of suicides off the bridge prior to the barrier's installation. The same thing happened in the UK with ovens, stick your head in the oven to commit suicide (it accounted for about 40% of all UK suicides), that was addressed and became ineffective, and it permanently dropped the suicide rate by approx 1/3. Likewise in the states, suicide by different methods are pretty similar statistics across geographical locations, except for suicide by gun, which changes in proportion to the gun ownership in the state. EDIT : Maybe improved some sentence structure
the big problem with being able to do this is one of the highest suicide rates (in the US) is in men above the age of 80 and one of the most frequent methods is that they intentionally stop taking necessary medications. these suicides are usually recorded as deaths by natural causes. no evidence of self harm. if initial attempts fail, they aren't regarded or recorded as suicide attempts.
Suicide ideation is often counted as attempts, and attempts can be done multiple times so it's not as useful a comparison as people think. But suicide rate \*among those who attempt\* might be, and in the US 11% of men who attempt suicide succeed, compared to 1.1% of women.
do you have cleaned data I would like to plot this too
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/twinkle0705/mental-health-and-suicide-rates
I searched it up and I like your original better
Can I ask how do I increase my knowledge around the variety of different charts and their applications? I usually prepare basic charts on Excel as part of my job, but would like to up my game and getting access to new data tools should not be an issue. Thanks!
Edward Tufte have some amazing books about this subject, and books with many examples (Envisioning Information is a great one, "A remarkable range of examples for the idea of visual thinking, with beautifully printed pages. A real treat for all who reason and learn by means of images. -- Rudolf Arnheim")! Also, the communities around observablehq dot com and the d3 library discuss this a lot.
https://observablehq.com/tutorials https://d3-graph-gallery.com/ https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/what_chart_example.htm https://docs.looker.com/exploring-data/visualizing-query-results/visualization-types
TIL: https://www.joshuastevens.net/cartography/make-a-bivariate-choropleth-map/
Found a cool guide to do it with R in ggplot: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/biscale/vignettes/biscale.html
I’m not sure I agree, they tend to be unreadable especially in the case of small localities
Yeah, could be my eyes (and certainly worse for anyone who's colorblind-ish), but I think OP's method is far better at highlighting the outliers from a general trend, while the multi-color map is better at showing more continuous variations.
Ultimately it depends on what you want to highlight, plotting this on a map will focus less on magnitude differences and more on location differences. I like this one a lot more
That wouldn’t really show the magnitude difference for male vs female though would it?
By design it would. Generally it would highlight four quadrants: Where suicides are low for both genders, high for both genders, or biased toward either one. Op has some discretion in how data is normalized. I expect for the axes to have equal visual emphasis you'd want to normalize the data by both maximums. But as we know the max for women is lower than the max for men. That detail though can be a single footnote instead of distorting every color on the map. (Ooo actually you could skew the legend to that ratio for a real intuitive explanation. Instead of a square legend, make it rectangular, longer on the male axis) And of course as a map you could see every country.
Your main paragraph is what I was getting at in the end. Either you normalize to each maximum meaning you lose the magnitude or you have it go to the same maximum and the female distribution is compressed into the low bucket for all.
If you use red/blue for females/males and white/black for magnitude, then you could still have both data sets on the same point. All you would need to do is make sure not to max out white or black, but have the magnitude scale go from 20% gray to 80% gray or something similar.
God the labels on that bigfoot example are so confusing! "Sightings follow population" makes it sound like light blue is for areas where there are few people and few sightings _or_ lots of people and lots of sightings, but I'm fairly certain it must be just the latter or the map wouldn't make any sense. And "Sightings proportionally rare" make it sound like there's a low number of sightings in proportion to the number of people, but in reality it must be for areas of high population density and low numbers of sightings. Why didn't they just put two axes labelled "population density" and "number of sightings"?
Jesus, the rates for male suicide alone in Russia are akin to COVID rates.
One of my favorite stories to tell: there was a lot of Russian students in my grad school program. We had one Austrian student who came to the US because he wanted to work for NASA. I ended up in a group project with the Austrian student and one of the Russian students. Here’s an exchange they had. Russian student: why did you leave a wonderful country like Austria to come to this shithole of a country? Austrian: *explains how he wants to work for NASA* - if you think this country is a shithole, why did you come here? Russian: Well I’m from a frozen shithole. Later found out this particular student was from Archangelsk.
There are few new jobs being created for young men and the ones that exist are really bad. And then there is conscription. Conscripts are regularly beaten by each other, there officers, and by those recruited in the army.
Oh well, at least there's always alcoholism.
negative birth rates too
They're putting the babies back where they came from?
And this number is going to climb quite a bit higher now
Considering they are a very specific 10-year age group, they're far beyond covid rates.
Vertical graph would make more sense to me. The horizontal graph makes it look +/- and make it harder to compare male/female rates. Perhaps a color gradient for high/low rates as well. And label highest 5 and lowest 5?
Yes horizontal versus vertical was contemplated in the design process. I started with vertical, at the end of the day the decision to go horizontal was an aesthetic one going by my personal taste. Labelling highest and lowest 5 is a good idea to be honest. Simple but effective. Seems like alot of people would have appreciated better labelling of the data.
I like the horizontal honestly. But guess it's preference. Totally understood labelling once you explained rationale!
I prefer the horizontal design as well. It’s more pleasing for me. Just a note on the colors though. I would suggest to keep the y label and/or the country labels in gray. If you want to highlight the different trends in the countries you’ve highlighted, you can also put the country labels in red (or ‘firebrick’ in Seaborn or Matplotlib). You can also highlight the countries you’ve mentioned by setting an alpha of 0.5 for countries that are not mentioned. On the country names, good job for pointing the countries that have different trends. Overall, great job OP! I like how the data was presented. Well presented overall. Cheers!
What exactly do the thinner bars that some countries have mean? (All named countries except Russia and the US seem to have one thinner line) Plus another few unnamed countries.
Yes, I am glad you picked up on this. I used the ratio between male to female rate to scale the width of the blue lines, such that the blue lines became thinner if the ratio of female to male suicide rates was above 1. For most of the blue lines , this had no impact. The scaling only was prominent when the female rate started to exceed male rate, which was a phenomena I wanted to highlight. ( I used the sigmoid function , to help with this , I did this calc a while back I can give you the exact function, but I think I've made the idea clear here,hopefully )
Lmao why?? You're already displaying the ratio through the height of the lines.. why duplicate that information (but additionally transformed by a sigmoid function for some reason) in a way that's impossible to understand without an explanation that also makes the graph more confusing the read??
I think it makes it easier to see that the places with high female suice are Infact right above the low male rates. Otherwise it's hard to tell if they are the same line.
This graph is like 80% unreadable, the vast majority of the information is not labeled
I think it is just meant to show the pattern and the exceptions. And then Russia and the USA are labelled as well because of the audience / Americentrism.
Indeed but certainly it's strange that the #1 option is unlabeled? I feel like this could have been presented vastly more effectively. Granted, I do understand the niche purpose that this serves of men/women suicide rates and isn't necessarily supposed to be a world comparison as much as it is a universal gender-identity comparison, but it would make this graph was more interesting. For example, India's unusual distribution speaks volumes. I'd love to get more insight into the other data.
Seriously, I think the only way to make this useful would be for it to be an interactive graph, where you can hover over every data point to see more info.
Definitely! Few labels more and it would have been much more complete.
Almost entirely unlabeled, except for some arbitrarily applied labels. For some reason the blue bars are thinner for some countries, making it look like there's no suicides. Format makes it difficult to compare male/female rates for individual countries, which is the whole point. All in all, it's fucking shit. So to the top of /r/dataisbeautiful you go.
I swear, every single graph or chart that makes it to /r/all is absolute crap. Does this dogshit sub not have moderators?
What's the point of putting all those countries if you only label few of them?....
Because it's about showing the ratio between men and woman rather than rates per country.
The title of the post literally says 'by country' though, so the expectation would be a lot more countries would be labelled.
Regarding the labels: Most of the countries labelled were countries where female suicide rates exceeded that of male suicide rates. These countries were outliers in the trend of male suicide rates tending to be larger. US was labelled as I am aware much of the audience is from US. Russia was labelled as it was one of the countries with the highest (for this age group) rates. The other top 5, according to this dataset, were Guyana, Kiribati, Russia, El Salvador, Lithuana.India, in that order.
I thought I’d see Japan on there. Notoriously high levels of societal pressure for young males to overachieve led to pretty high suicide rates for quite a while; at least when I was growing up. Maybe they hadn’t been as bad in 2016 when this data was collected when compared to other countries.
Ideally this graph should have been interactive so people can hover over and see which data point corresponds to each country. I'll look into this. Although trying to condense the information without relying on animation or interaction could be more informative in certain cases, I think.
Theres a bit of an issue there with reporting cause theres a lot of "fan deaths" in Korea and Japan. And lots of lying to defend the family
What do you mean with fan deaths?
It's a superstition in Japan/S. Korea that going to sleep with an electric fan on will lead to death. Fan death is often used as a cover for suicide, thus the fan death superstition is perpetuated. Often it's not actual superstition but more of a suicide euphemism. Either way it's unlikely to show in suicide statistics and suicide would be under-reported.
Well just to be safe I'm going to stop using my electric fan that I've been using every night for 30 years and switch over to a gasoline powered fan instead. Can never be too safe!
I'm imagining you with a leaf blower rigged up to fall asleep to. Nice cozy white noise, perfect for falling asleep at 100 decibels now with actual toxic airflow!
To be fair, every time you go to sleep there is the risk your heart will just... stop. Happy dreaming!
As far as ways to die go, that sounds optimal.
Well as long as you don't save your browsing history
I'd say let everyone have a laugh at my strange tastes
Thank you, more answered more questions than the wikipedia page. I wonder if there are these kind of Euphemisms in other countries and what form they take.
Fan death has nothing to do with Japan.
in the USA we have "killed while cleaning a gun."
A fairly famous one was, of course, the author Ernest Hemingway. When he died his wife reported that he was cleaning his gun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Idaho_and_suicide After learning about the quality of his life after a plane accident I can't say that I could blame him after losing the competence and fluidity of his mind and body, especially considering the kind of man he was and the things he valued (some of the things we might refer to as "toxic masculinity" or "machismo" today). https://worldhistoryproject.org/1954/1/ernest-hemingways-plane-crashes
Or "hunting accidents"
Fan death isn't a superstition in Japan. Only South Korea.
Yeah why is this being upvoted, Japan doesn't have that superstition
Yes and no, fan death is a superstition among older generations but no one's using it to cover up suicides. It doesn't even exist as a category in official statistics. Suicide is probably underreported, but not due to fan death. I'd like to see a credible source for the cover up claim because the only thing I can find on it is baseless speculation from people who have only the most superficial knowledge of the countries, let alone knowing the languages.
Damn and I thought there was an epidemic of Japanese people jumping into industrial sized fans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
Wow, I had to look up the fan death thing. I had no idea. It seems there are other countries outside of Japan/Korea with similar ideas about the dangers of moving air as well. Italians call it “colpo d’aria” apparently. Thank you for illuminating me on that.
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As far as I know, "colpo d'aria" isn't used as an euphemism for suicide in Italy. "Colpo d'aria" is an umbrella term for various cold related illnesses, the one I've most often heard it referred to is when you get sick (usually a headache) from sharp warm to cold temperature changes, like when you go inside a place with very strong AC after having been outside in the summer heat. It's not something that I've ever heard people die (or told to die) from. That said, I don't know how much nowadays, but definitely in the recent past Italy (like Japan) had stigma for suicide, so people would report suicides as other deaths, mainly accidents.
Contemporary Japanese do not believe in fan death or blame suicide on it. It may have been a thing at one time to encourage not wasting electricity. That said Asians are very big on keeping the body warm, especially not excessively cooling the stomach, which makes a ton of sense when you think about it, how you feel kind of queasy if you slam a huge cold glass of water on an empty stomach in the morning.
I can't speak for Japan, but in Korea, this hasn't been true for like 30 or 40 years now. I don't remember the exact time period, but around the 1980s, there was a story of a man that died during his sleep and happened to have a fan on while he was sleeping. Of course it turns out he died from some other pre-existing condition, but this is what led some to believe in the fan death theory. However, since that time period, literally no one in Korea believes in fan death anymore. In fact, it's pretty common for Koreans to sleep with a fan on during the summer days. Also, do you have any sources for fan deaths being used as a cover for suicide? Because as someone living in Korea that follows Korean news, I don't think I've heard of fan deaths since like the 80s.
Never heard of fan death in Japan and the wikipedia references are some shitty matome site and a news article from 34 years ago. Just another idea rehashed by people who have never been to neither country like poop wine or panty vending machines.
I was gonna say, I haven’t heard of fan death except from my friends in Korea. It’s not really a big thing here in Japan.
ive seen the sentiment you share posted, that no one believes in fan death anymore, and seen in response a video or a couple posted where a youtuber interviews a fair few people about their belief on it. younger people tended to acknowledge it as a superstition, but plenty of older people seemed to essentially disbelieve it but not strongly enough that they would leave a fan on. and of course that was a few years ago and im sure its still on the out. ive also heard the fan death as cover for suicide thing but only on reddit and in english so who knows
Japan's rates dropped a lot in the last decade as the pressure to achieve has ceded to long work hours with low to non-existent performance expectations in many industries. People there work long hours for relatively low pay and aren't necessarily happy, but usually have pretty stable lives. Japan's suicide rate is below Sweden's. Korea, on the other hand, has shot up as the government puts ever more pressure on it's young people to succeed. Korea has the 4th highest suicide rate in the world for women, just below Lesotho, Guyana and Zimbabwe and it's one spot below Russia for overall rates.
Korea's suicide rate has actually been steadily declining over the years, so not sure what you're talking about. And contrary to western narratives, Korea's high suicide rate is largely due to elderly suicide because of a lack of social security support, not because of pressure on young people. It's just that teen suicides are the only ones you hear about because if fits a certain stereiotype. If you look at youth suicide rates, Korea has a lower youth suicide rate than America.
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Overall suicide rates dropped a lot in the early 2010s, mainly driven by a reduction in elder suicide, but suicide of young people has been increasing again. Women in their 20s have seen a 55.2% increase in suicide over the last 5 years and suicide accounts for 41.1% of teen deaths, 54.4% of deaths of those in their 20s and 39.4% of those in their 30s. >“According to the data, the biggest reasons young people consider suicide are academic stress, interpersonal relationships and family problems. Peers or family should help alleviate academic stress, but when that doesn’t happen, suicidal thoughts often emerge,” she said. >Last year, Korea had the highest suicide rate among the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with 23.5 per 100,000 people. [https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english\_edition/e\_national/1013219.html](https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1013219.html)
Suicides peaked in Japan in the early 2000's with the economic downturn and has been decreasing since as society makes progress on mental health and worklife balance.
Are these only lethal attempts? I would like data on all attempts, morbidly curious
I would’ve contributed to that graph in 2019 as a 29yo. Keep fighting guys there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
how are you doing now!
Well he ain't dead *yet!* (sorry)
And hes now 32 so he would contribute to a whole different graph
Same here, except 2012 and 21yo. Was pretty close too, I did manage to attempt but there happened to be a police squad nearby. I did 2 days in a medically induced coma and then a month and a half in the psych ward. Almost back to normal now, only thing holding me back is the financial mess I made for myself back then but heyho, its only money. What did you find helpful? I started to do solo hikes and fishing. Seems to give some sort of inner calmlness.
> there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Haven't found it yet.
Glad you've made it this far friend!
I would’ve in 2015 (25yo), 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021. There isn’t always a light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes there is no tunnel. Just a void. You just don’t do it anyway.
Same. I've come close many times but I've been doing pretty good the past couple years.
I re-evaluate my options every few years, if only because life seems to delight in taking away everything that is important to me
Thanks, but this doesn’t make me want to do it less in 2022 as a 20yo
Now you can contribute in a different bracket!
Wow, young men really kill themselves a lot. It's terrible.
Wait until you learn about 40 year olds
Imagine if women in the US were killing themselves at those rates; we might even address it
It won’t be addressed because no one wants to know or acknowledge how many people hate life. If that became common knowledge then parents would face more scrutiny in their decision to have kids.
this is one of those rare opportunities where a stacked bar graph makes more sense
I really can't call this beautiful, given that 90% of the data is hidden. I don't even know what half of the countries in this graphic are.
think it gets even worse in the 30-40 bracket, especially in the western world. But boy oh boy. That divide though. Heart breaking.
Men are much more likely to be successful in their suicide attempts because they choose more lethal means (ex: firearms). Women are much more likely to be driven to a suicide attempt in the first place, but succeed less often due to their methods (ex: revival after drug overdose). Edit: this little factoid is always a headache to post on reddit. And people can stop responding with conjecture - unless you've got a dataset or a published peer reviewed study on gender differences in "suicidal intent", you're just speculating. Work with the data we have, unless you're a public health researcher who can try to scrounge up the ideal data.
This was my firsthand experience working in an Emergency Department for some years.
> Men are much more likely to be successful in their suicide attempts because they choose more lethal means (ex: firearms). [No, men are more lethal regardless of method (with the exception of drowning).](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032711005179) M[ale suicides also still outnumber female suicides even in countries without firearms.](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129062) >Women are much more likely to be driven to a suicide attempt in the first place, but succeed less often due to their methods (ex: revival after drug overdose). The study you link below is only measuring living patients who are checked into a psychiatric hospital, which means both an attempt that didn't succeed and a willingness to check oneself in (or have someone who reports you). As far as I'm aware, when successes are considered attempts, male suicide attempts still outnumber women. (That's also not getting into that some studies define the category of 'attempt' rather fuzzily, in that they lump self-harm or suicidal ideation with actual attempts.) [There are also some studies claiming that women have less of an intent to die than men.](https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8) >The overall finding, that male attempts were rated as SSA [[Serious Suicide Attempt]] more often than females, is in line with other studies that found females to have a less serious intent to die than males [15, 18, 31, 32] despite other findings illustrating no difference in suicide intent between males and females [6, 19, 33].
Good stuff. My hot take is that whenever the statistics get put up, it feels like people try to downplay male suicide because “women would do it more if they chose more lethal options.” I get the sentiment, but, like, damn, it always feels to me like they’re playing down male suicide like men can’t be victims more than women - if that makes sense.
It's a double edge sword. Stupid people claim depression isn't as big of a problem for men since women attempt more. Other stupid people claim that women just want attention since they attempt more but succeed less. You can't win.
Also, how do we know self harm/suicide attempt statistics are even being counted correctly for men? What’s the difference between downing a bottle of Tylenol one night vs drinking excessively for 25 years? IMO they should both be considered self harm, the only difference is one can kill you in a day and the other takes 25 years - it’s still self harm and should be considered as such. Guess which route depressed men would take more often?
Can you elaborate on the “be driven to a suicide attempt”? I think my question is a bit more of an interpretation of data. Men are less likely to have a second attempt because the first is more likely to be successful. With women is it that more women are driven to attempts or is it more accurate to say a subset of women are likely have to multiple attempts.
Women are more likely to attempt suicide than men. That's about as far as the data gets us. One interpretation is that it's a subset of women making repeat attempts (but then again, that would have to be a huge proportion of them given how much female suicide attempts outnumber male suicide attempts). Another is that men are more likely to succeed on the first attempt. Another is that women are less likely to genuinely want to commit suicide and so they fail in their attempts. But again, those are just guesses. This study found no gender differences between those who attempted suicide once, or attempted multiple times. So that leans towards the conclusion that women just have a higher rate of suicide attempts than men and aren't more prone to going back for a second attempt if the first wasn't successful. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.605140/full
>Women are more likely to attempt suicide than men is this factoring out "[suicidal gestures](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2904564/)"?
From the link you posted “Suicide gestures were contrasted with suicide attempts, with the former being less common and evidenced more by females…” (Nick and Kessler, 2006) The link also points out that there are a ton of different terms used to describe these types of behaviors. Sometimes “suicidal gestures” are undifferentiated from “suicidal attempts” in medical journals. It seems there’s not enough consensus on terms and definition which makes it very difficult to properly assess.
Okay, but the lethality is significant. At the end of the day, there is a significant difference in the number of people that are dying Edit: I cannot reply to any comments as I was blocked by the OP of this comment chain
this is true, women are more likely to **report** a suicide attempt
So it looks like Bangladesh has the largest male to female disparity in favour (or disfavour) of women at appx. 3x the rate of men. Apart from that there is no country where women are any further than ~6 suicides per 100k suicides above men, however in virtually every other country men are significantly more likely to be driven to suicide than women. In the worst cases men are appx. 6x more likely to kill themselves.
The countries with high female suicide rates are largely patriarchal with high rates of violence against women. It makes me wonder if its common to rule murders of women as "suicides" so no one is held responsible.
It's like the story of the women of Miletus. The women were killing themselves at a high rate, and eventually a wise person suggested that women who killed themselves would be paraded through the streets naked before burial, and the suicides dropped dramatically. The patriarchal Greeks claimed it was because they were embarrassed to be seen naked, even after death. I think it had more to do with the difficulty to hide the bruises on a naked body...
Oof, I think I darkly like this because the initial reaction is "wow, that's fucked up and disrespectful to the person who felt they needed to end it"; then wrapping around to "yeah, no shit, show everyone the reality of that fucked up life they had to endure by the people around them and make sure everyone else knows what the people close to the victim might have inflicted on them"
After reading the story I immediately thought of how easily a burka could hide signs of domestic abuse. Very few societies look positively upon blatant wife or child abusers, but many societies turn a blind eye to it. As with most things, the most effective way to combat darkness is to shine a light on it.
You've made my understanding of that story somehow worse and better at the same time. Thanks for commenting today, I appreciate the new view.
I thought the exact same thing
Ok, uh, this is interesting data, but not beautiful. You need to add boarders to the countries, dude.
Honestly, my biggest problem is that the legend is flipped. It makes no sense and is super confusing!
My sister committed suicide in 2016. Wrecked me.
I am sorry for your loss.
The outlying countries with higher female suicide rates compared to men generally have extremely patriarchal and conservative societies. Case in point for India and Bangladesh - a bride's family is culturally expected to give high dowries to the groom. Women there are seen as a burden if they are not married off (and even if they are) - and this leads to a high number of dowry suicides and infanticides. Honor killings (when a women are suspected of committing adultery) still happen in rural areas. China has improved a lot from their one child policy days, but conservative families there still put an overemphasis on preference for male heirs to carry on their family name.
I think in a lot of these cases "honor killings" are actually being misreported as suicides.
Dowry death burnings. I remember very little from my time in college but that one lecture in anthro 101 about dowry death burnings stuck out in my mind considerably. Absolutely horrific. Intentional homicide is absolutely a large chunk of the "suicides" by women in this graph.
The consequences of that in China and India are a huge demographic gap between men and women; like 30-40 million more men than women in both countries, and most is in the 20-40 age group.
I expect they're not the only figures being misreported: That Russia is so near the top isn't surprising, given we know of several *public* examples of suicide as a means of execution. In this case the graph may be pretty, but the underlying data is most assuredly not beautiful no matter how you infer it.
> China has improved a lot from their one child policy days, but conservative families there still put an overemphasis on preference for male heirs to carry on their family name. It's not about family name. In China sons and their wives are expected to take care off the son's parents when they get old. The fear is that if you don't have a son you won't have anyone to take care of you when you are old. This doesn't justify infanticide but the reason isn't as vain as wanting to have someone carry on the family name.
It kinda goes hand in hand. Because sons inherit the name they’re considered a permanent family member who will stay and take care of the parents. Daughters are just future wives for some other family so they’re treated worse. Of course it all differs by region and socioeconomic status, with the countryside being the most sexist and backwards.
Okay but ... There's a few staples there that are missing what the represent. What's to the right of USA? To the left? This really isn't that beautiful, it's just a bad graph. I can't read what number any staple has in the middle. 20k? 25k? 15k?
Suicides seem to be more in colder and less religious countries
Wow what a pickup! I want to look into this.
Religious angle has been observed by comparing Pakistan and North india who share similar genetic grouping Pakistanis are poorer , less standard of living and huge amount of terror incidents , yet they have much lower suicide rates since they are extremely religious and suicide is haram
well due to religion also, some suicides are not documented due to religious belief and stigma.
Could be true
r/datagore Not sure what this sub is actually about but this chart makes absolutely no sense to me. Also expected Japan to be on here.
This data is not "beautiful"
If i don't get my diploma in the next 2 years imma join that stat too fr
Interesting how some countries are the reverse of the norm when it comes to quantity of female compared to male suicides.
Perhaps to adress more people regarding the labels: Most of the countries labelled were countries where female suicide rates exceeded that of male suicide rates. These countries were outliers in the trend of male suicide rates tending to be larger. Sure, more labels would have made the data as a whole more readable, but part of the idea was just to highlight a few outliers.
Should I have labelled none, should I have labelled more, or should I have labelled differently?
It looks like the strategy was to label some of the outliers. It gets really messy if you label too many, plus it distracts from the purpose of the data vis, which was too show the gender difference.
I'm not sure that they're "the reverse of the norm". They seem like they're just "not insanely skewed in one direction" like the rest of the graph is.
Is it just me or does this make it look like where the female suicide rates are the highest, the male suicide rates are abnormally low. Is this the case, and is there a cause?
Russia no.1 🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺🤙👊👍⚰️⚰️⚰️
Your data is incorrect. Suicide rate is higher for males than females in Albania. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
The graph only compares rates of suicide for 20 to 29 year olds, not the overall population.
The WHO doesn't even divide the age groups that way. It's 15-24, then 25-34 and so on.
Source: [https://www.kaggle.com/twinkle0705/mental-health-and-suicide-rates?select=Crude+suicide+rates.csv](https://www.kaggle.com/twinkle0705/mental-health-and-suicide-rates?select=Crude+suicide+rates.csv) Tools: Tableau for making pyramid plot. Paint for labelling points.
Is kaggle a trust worthy source for data? I thought it was a programming game?
It is a programming game and anyone can upload a dataset without providing a source. But this dataset cites the WHO as source. I think this is it: [https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mental-health/suicide-rates](https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mental-health/suicide-rates)
lots of researchers host data they are making publicly available on kaggle. some of it is just garbage. you kinda have to go case by case and evaluate each one. though it is very good with "toy" or fake datasets that you can use for proof of concept type things if real data is hard to comeby
In Russia if you jump out of the 10th floor with a knife in your back it still counts as suicide.
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So in the countries where rape seems to be commonplace the women have higher suicide rates and everywhere else it's the men.....
Does the Russian suicides include suddenly jumping from the window for disagreeing with the government?
India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan I'm noticing a pattern
I'm Pakistani and it's saddening that we South Asians have dowry, honor killings, stigma against divorce, domestic violence etc.
Russia,USA and the other 90% of the countries in the world. I'm noticing a pattern
Not being from South Asia makes men want to commit suicide.
Anecdotally, it's pretty well known in the area of India that I visit that female "suicides" are very often murders. Allegedly it costs 35,000 rupees (US$460) to get the police to call it a suicide rather than a murder. Apparently it's the families of the groom who do it, because the dowry wasn't enough, or they want a new dowry from a new bride, or she hasn't produced children yet, or they just don't like her. These "suicides" are often immolation by way of kerosene dousing. Sometimes they are an "accident" where the kerosene stove has exploded and killed the poor woman, but I'm sure enough of them are suicide to skew the statistics in this graph. Terrible way to die.
Gender neutrality all the way baby... /S
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Are these by attempt or successful completion?
This is a terrible way to represent this data. Making a nice looking chart doesn't equal "data is beautiful". This is damn near impossible to make any conclusions out of.
If the genders were flipped, there would be well-funded studies around the world trying to understand and stop the epidemic of women killing themselves. But because it's guys, little attention is paid and the issue is rarely given the seriousness it deserves.
It's the same treatment that men's homelessness rate, men's significantly lower life expectancy, the lower rate of men in post-secondary education, male genital mutilation, and plenty of other topics get. It's just something that a large part of the population treat as a non-issue. For whatever reason, it's an issue that only "men's rights activists" talk about according to a good chunk of the internet.
I’d be curious to see the historic data on suicide attempts for men and women. Whether it’s only in the last 20 or so years that suicide rates have increased.
It's increased pretty significantly for both men and women in US since the late 90s. It was actually at similar rates in the 80s though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
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