Abstract
Suicide is a global public health burden, causing around 700,000 deaths annually along with many more non-fatal suicidal behaviours (World Health Organization, 2021). This is translated into the global age-standardised suicide rate at 9.0 per 100,000 population for 2019 (World Health Organization, 2021). Importantly, suicide is gendered. Despite women exhibiting a greater prevalence of suicidal ideation and behaviour, men are more likely than women to die by suicide (Canetto & Sakinofsky, 1998; Beautrais, 2002; Canetto & Cleary, 2012; see also Milner et al., 2020). Globally, the age-standardised suicide rate was 1.8 times higher in men than in women. At the time of writing, the imbalance between male and female suicide rates is higher in high-income countries and is close to 3, while the ratio is more equal in low- and middle-income countries. The only countries where the suicide rate is currently estimated to be higher in women than in men are Bangladesh, China, Lesotho, Morocco, and Myanmar (World Health Organization, 2021; see also: Canetto & Chen, 2020).
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Notes
- 1.
The corpus is a digitised and fully anonymised rendition of the original letters. We, as researchers, have not had access either to the original letters (e.g. to their materiality such as their handwriting) or to any personal data of their authors, while any references to their families, places of work, domicile and other identifying data have been removed from the corpus. All letters are marked with the gender and age of their authors, and in a minority of letters, the authors’ marital status is provided.
- 2.
The linguistic form of the translation is significantly different from the Polish original. The original is Mam coś z mózgiem, whose literal translation would be ‘I have something with my brain’. The sentence is a stereotypical rendering of a problem, including a health one, and its meaning is as shown in Extract 3.10</InternalRef>. Importantly, however, the point about the unmodalised sentence suggesting full commitment to the truthfulness of the sentences holds in both language versions.
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Galasiński, D., Ziółkowska, J. (2023). Men’s Illness and Suicide: Constructing Context. In: Brookes, G., Chałupnik, M. (eds) Masculinities and Discourses of Men's Health. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38407-3_3
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