Worldwide men are 75% of suicides even though women have worse mental health and make more attempts.

An intriguing paradox. From Why more men than women die by suicide by Helene Schumacher.

Tragically, suicide is not as rare as one might think. In 2016, the last year global data is available from the World Health Organization (WHO), there were an estimated 793,000 suicide deaths worldwide.Most were men.

In the UK, the male suicide rate is its lowest since 1981 – 15.5 deaths per 100,000. But suicide is still the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45. And a marked gender split remains. For UK women, the rate is a third of men’s: 4.9 suicides per 100,000.

It’s the same in many other countries. Compared to women, men are three times more likely to die by suicide in Australia, 3.5 times more likely in the US and more than four times more likely in Russia and Argentina. WHO’s data show that nearly 40% of countries have more than 15 suicide deaths per 100,000 men; only 1.5% show a rate that high for women.

The trend goes back a long way. "As long as we've been recording it, we've seen this disparity," says psychologist Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice-president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a health organisation that supports those affected by suicide.

[snip]

One of the questions that has persisted, though, regards this gender gap. It seems especially large given that women tend to have higher rates of depression diagnoses. Women also are even more likely than men to attempt suicide. In the US for example, adult women in the US reported a suicide attempt 1.2 times as often as men.

So, worldwide men are ~75% of all suicides even though women have much higher rates of mental illness and even though women attempt suicide with greater frequency.

That is a pretty startling combination of facts when strung together. Even though reflexively they need to introduce an anti-gun theme into the argument

But male suicide methods are often more violent, making them more likely to be completed before anyone can intervene. Access to means is a big contributing factor: in the US for example, six-in-10 gun owners are men – and firearms account for more than half of suicides.

even though it is a non sequitur. The issue is not how they kill themselves, it is why they do so and why that is consistently high around the world despite all the differences in gun access everywhere.

The rest of the article is a meandering slinging of factoids against the argument wall to explain these inexplicable facts. After failing to make an argument for to explain the 75% disparate impact, Schumacher goes on to round up some solutions to a problem we don't understand from causes we cannot yet determine.