> There are countries where women die by suicide more often than men.
Agreed. We might take the fact that more women die by suicide than men in those countries to say that women are relatively worse off than men in those countries than women are to men in countries where the ratio is reversed.
> You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer.
Agreed, but it's unclear which direction this would push the numbers: more men die by drug overdose than do women, though I can't find a breakdown by gender of prescription drug overdose. And plenty of other methods can also be miscoded, e.g. intentional car crashes, which are one of men's preferred methods. The only ones that I'd expect to be coded correctly most of the time are exsanguination and hanging. But we've got to do the best we can with the numbers we have, and try to improve accuracy while we're at it.
> This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
Correction noted. A previous attempt at death by suicide is a significant risk factor for future attempts at suicide, with somewhere between a third and a half of deaths by suicide being on a second-or-more attempt, but my "likely" was incorrect. It also seems like reattempts aren't likely to account for the gendered divergence in attempts versus deaths, because the large majority of first attempts at suicide don't result in future attempts.