Tycherin wrote:Lord Chrusher wrote:Shandi wrote:(snip)
It did.
While you have to be very careful to control societal effects in the prevalence of mental health disorders between the sexes, I would be very surprised if their was no difference at all in the rates of metal health disorders between the sexes.
One interesting fact I came across is while females are more likely to attempt suicide in western culture, males are far more likely to succeed in killing themselves so the suicide rate is higher in males than females (Wikipedia).
Psychologists love trying to find gender differences in the incidence of various conditions, perhaps because it's such an easy manipulation to do. They are also routinely disappointed by a lack of any significant differences. There are some consistently demonstrable effects, like the suicide one you mentioned, but the majority of them are small or nonexistent.
Now that's somewhat up for debate, but the crux of the issue is that it's hard to separate biology from sociology with gender. Men are socialized to keep their feelings contained (in general in American society, which is where a lot of this research gets done), and that means men are less likely to report or be diagnosed with various mental illnesses. Controlling for the effects of society in this case is essentially impossible, at least with the current tools at our disposal.
If I'm not mistaken, much of the difference in suicide completion rates between men and women can be explained by two things. Tycherin mentioned one of them: preventative strategies (mental health help). The other is methods. Women tend to use methods that are less immediately lethal (drug overdosing) while men resort to actions with higher mortality (firearms).
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Arclight_Dynamo wrote:
Well, guess what? Feminism helps us all.
And if we want to get the people who push back to hop on board the feminism train, we need to make that clear to them. Feminists aren't looking to elevate women at the expense of men; feminists are looking to make a better world for everyone.