Miss Stacey May I Have Another

Women suffer from depression at a much higher rate than men, but I am not convinced that depression is such a straight road to suicide. Women lead men in suicide attempts at a two-to-one ratio, but most psychologists are quick to point out that a suicide attempt is usually something very different than suicide. About 95 percent of suicide attempts are meant to be a solution in itself, a way to jar loose the problem for everyone else to see clearly and to assist. I understand this. When I was 20 years-old I gobbled a bottle of sleeping pills and later that year I slit my wrists. Yet, had there been a rifle in my closet I wouldn’t have used it. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be reborn.

Women are only 25% of all suicides. Modern psychologists like George E. Murphy speculate that a woman is less likely to commit suicide because “She’ll consider not just her feelings but also the feelings of others — her family, the children, even acquaintances and how those people will be affected by a decision like suicide.” The idea of women taking their own lives has been considered so incompatible that there is very little historical research on the subject. A woman committing suicide was considered an anomaly not worth studying. In 1883 a writer in London’s Contemporary Review wrote, that ‘three-fourths of the cases [of suicides] are males, which shows that if the female intellect be less powerful than man’s it is at the same better balanced, or at least more capable of standing against reverses of fortune, and facing the battle of life.” It was even suggested that women who committed suicide were suffering from the effects of trying to be a man.