From the abstract of a study published online in JAMA Psychiatry Feb. 12.
In the United States, men die by suicide at 3.5 times the rate of women.1 One driver of this gender disparity may be high traditional masculinity (HTM), a set of norms that includes competitiveness, emotional restriction, and aggression.2 Quantitative studies of HTM are interrelated with discourse on hegemonic masculinity.3
In that first study to show the association were also additional findings the study’s lead investigator, Daniel Coleman, PhD, associate professor of social service at Fordham Univ., New York City, called both significant and rare to have evidence for, discussed at medscape.com in “Excessive Masculinity Linked to High Suicide Risk”.
Among the additional findings, one was that men with HTM were about two and half times more likely to die by suicide than their counterparts without HTM. Another was that
high traditional masculinity was associated with a host of other significant risk factors for suicide death [such as] acting-out behavior."
…previous studies suggest[ed] that HTM men experience suicidal thought to a greater degree than other persons...
The study is a secondary analysis of the national longitudinal Add Health study, which began in 1995 and followed 20,745 adolescents [i.e., all genders] through young adulthood. Not only did that study show a direct association between measures of HTM and death by suicide, but it also corroborated the connection between HTM and other risk factors for suicide revealed in earlier research[:] ■ suicide by a family member ■ being expelled from school ■ running away from home ■ using a weapon ■ being of white race ■ a past history of smoking ■ being in a serious fight in the past year ■ delinquency ■ fighting ■ suicide [ideation] ■ depression ■ gun access. … There was no association between HTM and nonfatal suicide attempts.
...HTM may be an underlying influence in male suicide that increases the probability of externalizing such behavioral risk factors as anger, violence, gun access, and school problems.
"There are already things going on around the world to try to address the risk factors of masculinity for suicide death. So even though we haven't had the evidence that it's a risk factor, people have been operating under that assumption anyway," said Coleman.
"Hopefully our research contributes to raising the profile that high traditional masculinity is a relevant risk factor that we can organize prevention and treatment around," he added.
...The finding that almost all of the victims of suicide [in thix were men underscores the central role that gender plays in these tragedies.
Comments on the findings for Medscape Medical News, by Mark S. Kaplan, DrPH, professor of social welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs of the University of California, Los Angeles, included that this “begins to add to the puzzle of why men have a higher mortality rate than their female counterparts. Because when it comes to suicide, men and women really are apples and oranges. … masculinity might be interacting with some of the harsh socioeconomic conditions that many men face. I think all of this points to the real need to understand why men die from suicide..."
To all appearances —absent free full text for the actual published research report— neither the researchers, commenters, nor Medscape writer exhibit the slightest ironic awareness that women and girls on average in our world face much harsher socioeconomic conditions than men do. Since Coleman mentions things going on around the world to try to address masculinity as a suicide risk, and since Kaplan mentions men and women being apples and oranges where suicide is concerned, this sheds light from another angle:
There is also no awareness of the irony of citing men’s suicide “tragedies” without that characterization for the harms and deaths of others subjected to HTM males’ associated behavior “risks” of ■ using a weapon ■ being of white race ■ fighting ■ gun access ■ anger ■ violence…
Others such as girls and women. For example, condensing from a reuters-via- medscape item:
Analysis of Louisiana mortality data at JAMA Pediatrics found women twice as likely to be murdered while pregnant or soon after giving birth than any other time in life, with homicide commonest among all pregnancy-&-birth-related causes of death. Lead author Maeve Wallace —Tulane Univ. School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, New Orleans— said this is “documented in lots of other states around the country" [and] these kinds of homicides often involve an intimate partner...”
Even motor vehicle and other accidents killed fewer pregnant women and new mothers. The rate of homicide deaths also was twice as high as other causes, and ages 10 to 29 were the riskiest.
Prof. Phyllis Sharps at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore, and Elsie Lawler Endowed Chair, said of this research that a violent individual is focused on power and control, a pregnant woman being preoccupied by the pregnancy and her baby —as she should be— feels threatening to the violent person because she pays less attention to that person, doing less of what that person wants. Generally, the violence escalates...
To Wallace and Sharps, such research should spur healthcare providers to use existing guidelines for asking female patients about being hurt, or fears of it, and community organizations to find ways of protecting pregnant and postpartum women.
Doctors should have no preconceived notions, Sharps said. "Any woman at any time can be a victim of ... violence … So they should just ask all women.
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As heartless toward HTM men as it may seem, there’’s a possibility here that besides frantic, furious despair over lack of control and security in their own lives, these suicides may also represent self-execution by males with enough conscience to recognize their traditional-masculinity patterns of harm toward others. If so, that’s tragic for society indeed, since it would mean it’s the HTM males without conscience who remain among us.
Egalitarian societies, communities and families that choose to be far less simplistically, traditionally male and female seem fundamental to resolving all these tragedies. The implications for war, economics, and human rights seem pretty profound. As does the mercy for men who don’t mean to harm others, and only struggle hopelessly to do the right thing under impossible demands.