Suicide In Women Research Articles

I (o)kunskapens frånvaro. Kön och självmordsbeteenden inom suicidologi

We still lack knowledge about what implications gender has in suicidal behaviours. This is particularly true when it comes to women's suicides and suicidal attempts. In this article I argue that one reason for this is that suicidology has had a "gender neutral" approach to it's research object. This has often meant that studies on men have been generalized to the whole "suicide population". When gender has been on the agenda, it has been treated in a problematic way. Through a critical analyses of the studies that have been done in this field, the article is able to show that the knowledge gap existing in suicidology is filled with traditional theories of gender roles. That is, mythology enters the knowledge-empty spaces. The article also discusses the serious consequenses this has for women seeking help fortheir suicidal thoughts. In spiteofthefact that women are overrepresented concerning both suicidal attempts and serious sucicidal thoughts, suicidology still doesn't picture womens suicidal behaviours as one of its primary issues.

Female Suicide, Subjectivity and the State in Eighteenth‐Century China

This article examines the social and political significance of female suicide in Qing Dynasty China and its implications for women's agency, feminine subjectivity and the state's interpretation of violence. Tracing the development of state and elite interpretations of the propriety of women's suicides, it situates the discourse on female suicide in the context of state efforts to control the definition and enactment of moralised violence and pervasive rhetoric about women's incapacity for moral agency. Demonstrating the problematic ethical and judicial status of suicides committed in the wake of a violation of chastity, in particular, it argues that such suicides represented a distinctively female definition of moral order and the role of violence within it.

Childhood Abuse and Suicidality in Women

Childhood Abuse and Suicidality in Women

African American college women's suicide buffers.

African American women have lower suicide rates than other women and men in the United States They may possess suicide buffers including social support, religiosity, negative attitudes regarding suicide acceptability, and African American culture. To examine the relationships buffers may have with suicide ideation, 300 African American female college students completed measures of suicide ideation and buffers. Three variables accounted for a significant and unique portion of the variance in suicide ideation: family support, a view that suicide is unacceptable, and a collaborative religious problem-solving style. The identification of these factors may help in the assessment, prevention, and intervention of suicide for African American women and other women and men.

UNTAMED HEARTS: EROS AND SUICIDE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINESE FICTION

AbstractIn Chinese fiction there are heroines who use suicide as a vehicle to convey to eternity the strength of their passions, from love to hatred, from jealousy to thirst for revenge. The present paper is an exploration of late imperial literary representations which depict women's suicide as an act of passion and self-reassertion: this act, rather than being constructed as defeat in the face of adversities, a response to abuse suffered, or as a last resort to preserve chastity, is presented as a path of independence that shows these female characters not as virtuous martyrs or victims of an unjust patriarchal system, but as passionate agents of free will. These sources challenge the assumption that women's suicide in Ming and Qing fictional sources is primarily related to chastity. In this sense, they are useful in furthering understanding of the complex ways in which legal and moral mandates around the issue of women's suicide could be resisted, absorbed, and ignored in late imperial vernacular fiction.

Whither Hunter's Culture War? Shifts in Evangelical Morality, 1988-1998

Ten years have passed since the events of the late 1980s spurred James Davison Hunter to write his book Culture wars, which was published in 1991. Since then, the political world has witnessed several shifts that call into question the durability of this conflict. This paper examines both the current state of the culture war and its precipitating trends over the past decade. In doing so, it is necessary to determine whether evangelicals have been softening their traditionalist moral positions on issues like women's roles, homosexuality, nonmarital sexuality, birth control, abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. It is also necessary to determine the nature of any fluctuations in evangelical morality relative to that of religious progressives and moderates. Specifically, three questions are addressed. First, are evangelicals leaving the socioeconomic margins of society? Second, is evangelical morality becoming more liberal? And finally, is the culture war dissipating? Using data from the 1988 and 1998 General Social Surveys, results indicate that evangelicals are capitulating on some - though not all - arenas of moral conflict, but that the cultural tension between evangelicals and religious progressives remains strong. The evidence suggests that, consistent with Christian Smith's subcultural identity theory, evangelicals will likely continue to experience a cultural tension with the larger culture, but this tension is not likely to result in anything resembling warfare.

"She Would Rather Depart the Earth in Fire": Reading Diotima's Death in Friedrich Hölderlin's <i>Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece</i>

This article examines the death of Diotima in Friedrich H?lderlin's Hyperion Oder der Eremit in Griechenland. It proposes that her death is a male fantasy rather than a textual necessity, as previous critics have hitherto argued. At the same time, it shows through careful textual analysis that a woman's suicide, when carefully chosen and staged, can be read as a means of resisting male fantasy. (YS) The complexity of Friedrich H?lderlin's lyrical novel Hyperion Oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece) is such that no single interpretive venture will ever capture its fullness. H?lder lin's dialectical thinking and his critical philosophy make any attempt at interpretation of the novel a daunting task at all levels, including his torical, philosophical, and literary. I do not wish to pretend to have captured the novel's complexity fully with this article. Rather, I want to propose a close textual analysis that identifies Diotima's gender as the precipitating factor in her death. In this reading, death emerges as the site of both male fantasy and female resistance.

Domestic Dangers

This article critically analyzes suicide as self-directed violence against Indian women. Although official statistics report a higher suicide rate for men than for women in India, it is women's suicide that is at the center of widely publicized social and policy debates. Through case studies, newspaper reports, and statistical accounts, women's household deaths and suicides are scrutinized in this article. Because the dominant context of women's suicide is the marital family, self-destructive behaviors have been compared to dowry death, one form of violence against women perpetrated by others within the marital family. Based on the author's ethnographic research in Maharashtra, the author argues that women's household deaths be viewed as part of a broad incitement to suicide in which violence is internalized and directed against the self.

Culture, gender, and suicidal behavior in Sri Lanka.

In less than 50 years, the rate of suicide among Sri Lankans has risen from a modest level to one of the highest in the world. This article describes the current pattern of suicides, including sex differences and similarities, and reviews some of the institutional practices, material conditions, and social norms that may figure in the increases. A study is reported, which asked how ordinary Sri Lankans account for suicidal behavior and what practices they recommend for assisting suicidal individuals. Gender inflected these accounts, with essentialist accounts associated with women's suicides and contextual accounts associated with men's suicides.

A Prospective Study of Coffee Drinking and Suicide in Women

Among the many reported central nervous system effects of long-term caffeine use is improvement in mood. To examine prospectively the relationship of coffee and caffeine intake to risk of death from suicide. We conducted a 10-year follow-up study (1980 to 1990) in an ongoing cohort of 86 626 US female registered nurses aged 34 to 59 years in 1980, who were free of diagnosed coronary heart disease, stroke, or cancer. Information on coffee and caffeine intake was collected by a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire in 1980. Deaths from suicide were determined by physician review of death certificates. Fifty-six cases of suicide occurred during 832 704 person-years of observation. Compared with non-drinkers of coffee, the age-adjusted relative risk of suicide in women who consumed two to three cups per day was 0.34 (95% confidence interval [CI, 0.17 to 0.68) and 0.42 (95% CI, 0.21 to 0.86) in women who consumed four or more cups per day (P for linear trend=.002). These findings remained essentially unchanged after adjusting for a broad range of potential confounding factors, including smoking habit, alcohol intake, medication use (diazepam and phenothiazine), history of comorbid disease (hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, or diabetes), marital status, and self-reported stress. A strong inverse relationship was similarly found for caffeine intake from all sources and risk of suicide. The data suggest a strong inverse association between coffee intake and risk of suicide. Whether regular intake of coffee or caffeine has clinically significant effects on the maintenance of affect or the prevention of depression merits further investigation in clinical trials and population-based prospective studies.

Preventing suicide in women and men.

A review of gender differences in the response to suicide prevention strategies suggests that they may be more effective in helping suicidal women than suicidal men. More attention needs to be given to the problem of directing these strategies to suicidal men.

Treating a Holocaust Survivor Without Addressing the Holocaust

The case presented by Abramowitz et al. echoes some of the same points as the last case. Here a 63 year old woman's depression and suicide attempts were exacerbated by deteriorating inter-generational relationships. A combination of behavioral, cognitive, and supportive techniques served to strengthen her defenses and brought about a remission from her depression without addressing repressed issues of the Holocaust.

Covert and Overt Dependence in Suicidal Women and Their Male Partners

Dependence has traditionally been associated with suicidal behavior, especially in women. According to recent psychodynamic formulations, overt expression of dependence is influenced by covert mental representations and context-interactional variables. This study explored the covert mental representations and the interactional context of dependence in suicidal women and their male nonsuicidal partners. On the basis of theory, we hypothesized that suicidal women and their partners would have similar covert dependent needs, but opposite styles of dealing with these needs. The suicidal women would express these needs directly through overt dependent behavior while their partners would manifest their dependent needs indirectly through reinforcing dependent behavior in suicidal women. As predicted by theory, suicidal women and their partners were found to be similar in terms of covert dependence and different with regard to overt behavior—male partners tending to foster dependence in suicidal women. Contrary to prediction, most suicidal women did not directly express excessive dependence.

Are women's suicides really different from men's?

The suicide notes of females and males were compared for the presence of 50 classifications (protocol sentences) regarding twelve discrete psychological variables: conscious intention, perturbation, lethality, relations, self-cognitions, truncated cognitions, cognitions regarding an after life, the experience of trauma, fear of insanity, egression, early life stresses, and serial instability. Independent judges noted the incidence of contents corresponding to the protocol sentences in 40 suicide notes, twenty notes for each sex controlled for age. No sex differences were noted. Converging data from Shneidman (1971) and Tomlinson-Keasey, Warren and Elliot (1986) on suicide in gifted women and men was presented to support this negative finding. Although further studies are warranted, it may well be that there are no sex differences on many critical (genotypic) psychological variables in suicide notes and, by implication, suicide.

Suicidal Women and Their Relationships with Their Parents

This study examines the families-of-origin of suicidal females, with particular focus on their parents. The data are drawn from fifty female suicide attempters and include life history materials, diaries and letters, interviews with therapists, and material from group counseling sessions. Five parental characteristics are identified and described-non-nurturing parents, absent parents, abusive parents, mentally ill parents, and alcoholic parents. These characteristics are described and examples presented. Their relationship to the individuals' suicidal behaviors is discussed.

Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century

Suicide, like woman and truth, is both fetish and taboo. A symbolic gesture, it is doubly so for women who inscribe on their own bodies cultural reflections and projections, affirmation and negation. In the nineteenth century, women's suicide becomes a cultural obsession. As Baudelaire suggests, the captain of this century bracketed by Goethe's Werther and Durkheim's Le Suicide is death. To take one's life is to force others to read one's death. For when

Book reviews

Delinquency and Justice by William E. Thornton, Jr., Jennifer A. James and William G. Doerner. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1982, 530 pp., $18.95 cloth. Suicidal Women by Charles Neuringer and Dan J. Lettieri. New York: Gardner Press, 1982, 119 pp.

The Clear and the Hidden: Person, Self, and Suicide among the Telefolmin of Papua New Guinea

Among the Telefolmin, women's suicide is culturally recognized while men's suicides are held to be exceptional; despite this, more men commit suicide than women, a pattern contrary to cultural expectations. Analysis of motives reveals that men tend to commit suicide in the face of rupture in marital relations. An examination of concepts of male personhood demonstrates that the culturally enjoined requirement of self-restraint and emotional muting is suspended in husband-wife relations. From this point of view marriage affords a privileged relation in which a man's self is permitted to emerge, while marital disruption jeopardizes this emergent self. In such circumstances suicide is the final act in an already advanced process of destruction of the self.

Women's suicides

According to J. Leibovich, since 1920 the relative number of suicides among women (as compared with the number of suicides among men) has increased 2.3 times in Russia. Out of 413 female suicides in 1920-1922, there were 163 among maidens, 162 among married women, and 34 among widows. There were 63 illiterates among suicides, 134 with little illiteracy, 19 with secondary education, and only one with higher education.