Maajid Nawaz Jordan Peterson interview
Posted May 23, 2018, 10:32 AM UTC
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Interesting how males and females attempt suicide about as much as each other. So it's entirely possible that the skew in the statistics towards males is mostly due to the fact that males are, on average, more aggressive and thus choose more lethal methods. Does anyone know any studies on this particular aspect of suicide?
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Women actually attempt suicide more often
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And even more specifically adolescent girls are at extremely high risk but the poster above is correct that men tend to choose more lethal methods and so the rates of successful suicide are higher in males.
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An age breakdown would be interesting. My hypothesis is that men commit suicide later in life whereas the majority of suicide attempts by women are in the early adult years
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That's also true, it's been a while since I've seen these stats in my coursework so take this with a grain of salt but middle aged white men are at a several times higher rate of suicide than the general population.
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I wouldn't be surprised if the age effect isn't very big. Teens and adolescents kill themselves at fairly high rates as well.
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I think there are two different phenomena here. There is ' attempted suicide' where the goal is to kill yourself and there is 'attempted suicide' where the goal is to show people how much pain and misery you are going through so they can help you. Both are tragic and neither is morally superior or anything, but let's not compare apples and oranges.
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You can add that as an explanation but it's still the same variable, just like women generally being less capable at killing themselves would be another explanation.
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Fair enough, I have no objective data on capability of carrying out that task by gender. I just think success rate for suicide (if that is the intended goal) comes down to intelligence and I don't think there is a big gap in intelligence one way or the other between genders. Maybe access to means (e.g guns, drugs) is another explanation?
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So it's entirely possible that the skew in the statistics towards males is mostly due to the fact that males are, on average, more aggressive and thus choose more lethal methods.
Women attempt suicide much more often than men, but do it for different reasons.
Women tend to "attempt suicide" as a cry for help, hoping to be rescued by loved ones. Usually it's a bottle of pills or cutting.
Men tend to blow their brains out or hang themselves, which are not cries for help.
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Men tend to blow their brains out or hang themselves, which are not cries for help.
My mom is a mortician and every time she tells me about someone who committed suicide, it's a man, who made a definitive choice to kill himself.
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Just a comment regarding optional paid leave for fathers.
In Norway, the long standing system has seen a three-part split of paid parental leave (PPL). 6 weeks are for mothers only, 10 weeks are for fathers only, and ~40 weeks can be freely given to mom or dad. The overwhelming trend has been for fathers to take out whatever leave is father-only, while the rest goes to mother. This led our prime minister Erna Solberg to state, last year, that she was "disappointed in Norwegian men".
I wholeheartedly agree that the laws surrounding parenthood are a puzzle yet to be solved. We will have new legislation here, probably, giving mothers and fathers an equal amount of dedicated PPL. The pot is no longer going to distributed according to the discrecion of the family. Now, for the first time ever, mothers are facing a decrease in the amount of PPL they are allowed to take out. Interestingly, this new system is being championed in the name of feminism. The reasoning is as follows:
Women need careers to be happy, and they can't have careers because they are being discriminated against in the labor market. Businesses are free to choose male applicants on the grounds that they are less likely to disappear for a whole year of parental leave (and there is some evidence that this is not uncommon). The solution, then, is to force fathers to take parental leave, so that businesses can't feel as safe that their male employees won't disappear, and in any case neither men or women can now have more than 5-6 months of PPL.
It might work as intended, but I would be surprised if this new system would make women more happy. Many mothers are happy to stop breastfeeding at 6 months, itching to get back to work. There is, however, quite a large segment of mothers who really get into motherhood. They want to breastfeed well past the first year, they are - more than fathers - motivated to spend time with their babies, and in many cases the pregnancy and labor has taken such a toll that they are simply ready to go back to work. For these mothers, the new system will feel brutal.
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OP please post this as a comment in the megathread:
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Overall, good interview covering many of the topics Sam has discussed on his podcasts. I found little to disagree with.
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