ABCnews looks at why girls consider suicide.
Lee Dye writes (excerpt):
Part of the answer emerges in a major study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The simple answer is girls need close, personal friends more than boys, and when those friendships fail girls are far more likely to think of ending it all.
The study, by sociologists James Moody of Ohio State University and Peter Bearman of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, draws from a wealth of data collected during 1994 and 1995. That data is part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, which resulted from interviews with thousands of adolescents across the country in an effort to measure the health and welfare of our young people.
Bearman and Moody combed through the data to see what they could learn about teenage suicides. They had expected to find some difference between boys and girls, but they were not prepared for the scale of that difference.
They found that girls were twice as likely as boys to attempt suicide if they had few friends and were isolated from their peers.
“That’s an astonishing figure,” says Moody. Isolation among girls ranks right up there with having a friend who commits suicide in terms of causing a youngster to think about ending it all. But it had no effect on boys.
The statistics also show that it’s important for a girl’s friends to be friends with each other.
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The difference in the statistics for males and females lies primarily in their relationships with their friends, the researchers conclude.
“Boys’ relationships tend to be more diffused,” Moody says. “They hang out as a group, and the relationships are much more fluid.”
“Girls spend a lot of time on their phones, in close, tight-knit social relationships,” he says. You don’t have to be a sociologist to see girls involved in intimate conversations, exchanging secrets that boys would never reveal. Take away those friends, and girls have fewer places to turn.
The study also suggests that when those relationships fail, girls tend to internalize it all. Boys, Moody says, tend to externalize it, making them more likely to carry a weapon to school to seek revenge. That, too, often results in suicide, but Moody says that’s probably not the main motive. Boys just want to get even, he says, and girls are more likely to blame themselves.
Of course, it’s easy to generalize these things and draw broad, sweeping conclusions on the basis of scant evidence. Peer relationships are very complex, and there’s probably a little bit of the chicken and the egg question here.
Are girls who consider suicide pushed that way because they are isolated, or are they isolated because they are a bit suicidal and not exactly the kind of person anyone wants to hang out with?
“That’s a great question,” Moody says. “And we don’t have a perfect answer.”