Female depressives attempt suicide at a higher rate than men. Men achieve suicide at a higher rate than women because they on average use more violent and irreversible means (such as firearms vs pills). The higher success rate doesn't mean the symptoms are worse.
Either way, assuming the same amount of men end up on this form of birth control as women are on hormonal birth control, there'd be severe consequences. Around 10 million women take the pill regularly, and the male equivalent would result in 50,000 more successful male suicides annually. That would more than DOUBLE the annual suicide total, on just 10 million men taking this pill.
I understand that female birth control is not without side effects - even relatively severe ones. But the current narrative that men are being wimps about this is insulting. These side effects would end up in tens of thousands of people dying.
Yes, and those people dying is not an ok result. Which is why the research has stopped. I'm just asking why, if we're not ok with those side effects, we're not also putting more research into safer birth control for women too.
Also, if the researchers wanted people to take the announcement seriously without women whining about what we put up with for birth control, they should have left stuff like acne and mood swings out of the explanation for stopping the research, FFS.
It's not valid to take the frequency of occurrence in a small sample size (320), and multiply it up to a large population (10 million). I still agree it's not worth the risk, but it's also not likely to be an additional 31,250 suicide attempts among men.
(Which is how my math worked out - I'm not sure where your 50,000 number of successful suicides came from. The study had 320 participants with one suicide attempt. But, again, this sort of multiplication from small sample sizes to large sample sizes is not actually predictive, so it's kinda moot.)
Agreed. But one attempted suicide and one successful suicide in a sample of 320 is not insignificant. This could be an anomaly, sure, but given that the average rate of suicide is 12.93 per 100,000 people [1], and it on average takes 25 attempts to produce a single death, this study should've expected no attempts at all. The fact that there was not only an attempt, but another successful attempt is not insignificant. The researchers were not mistaken when they decided to cut the study short, lest they be responsible for more deaths.
I agree on the potential significance and caution, but the study had only one attempted suicide. None of the participants killed themselves. There was a separate incidence of severe depression.
To get the 50,000, I mistakenly, based off another comment, used 200 as the sample size. Your number, 31,250, would be correct (assuming the extrapolation holds) for the actual sample size.
> "An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself," he says.
> In attempted suicide, both men and women tend to use methods that allow for second thoughts or rescue. Murphy says that when people intend to survive, they choose a slowly effective, or ineffective, means such as an overdose of sleeping pills. That contrasts to the all-or-nothing means like gunshots or hanging used by actual suicides.
Men truly want to kill themselves far more than women, and your rationalizing is sexist nonsense.
