The Grass Isn't Always Greener On the Other Side

      Throughout our American Studies class their year our teachers have tried to really push us to include an "AOS" or "address the other side" in every paper we write, and Junior Theme is no exception. What they mean by AOS is that we should make sure that we acknowledge other opinions on the topics we are writing about. An argument becomes more well-rounded this way and shows that you have looked into alternative views or explanations for your topic. For my AOS, I decided to look into suicide and depression for women. I thought that maybe there was another possible explanation for the extreme suicide numbers for men in the comparatively low ones for women. The Encyclopedia of Gender and Society turned out to be a great source to help me look into this.

      I found that there is a lot of confusion surrounding suicides for women because of the methods they chose. Females suicides tend to be "misclassified as accidental" because of the "ambiguity" in their methods (817). While men tend to use violent methods, like shooting themselves, women tend to have more subtle ways. "Drug overdoes and poisoning" are common methods for women and it is often difficult to determine whether or not their deaths were purposeful or accidental. I concluded that since female suicides can often be misclassified it is possible that the male suicide rate seems larger simply because they have the wrong numbers for suicide rates for women.

Do you think this is a viable explanation for the difference in suicide rates? Why or why not? Why do you think women tend to use more ambiguous methods to commit suicide?