Girls and women have higher rates of suicidal ideation and behavior but lower rates of suicide mortality than boys and men. This is a dominant but not a universal pattern–which suggests that suicidal behavior is influenced by cultural factors. In this presentation I examine suicidal behavior from gender and cultural perspectives. I analyze the diversity of patterns and meanings of gender and suicidal behavior across cultures and countries, and question prevailing myths–including the ideas that women and men are “opposites” in terms of suicide motives and that this presumed motives-difference is universal. I then describe my cultural-scripts of-gender-and-suicidality theory. Its tenets are that everywhere suicide is a cultural act; and that a culture’s scripts of gender and suicidal behavior influence women’s and men’s suicidal behaviors–from whether they engage in it to the suicidal-behavior circumstances and method.

Silvia Sara Canetto is Professor at Colorado State University, USA, where she holds appointments in the Psychology Department, the School of Public Health, and Women’s Studies Program. She has graduate degrees from the University of Padova, Italy; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. She authored over 200 publications, mostly on gender, culture and suicidality, including “The gender paradox in suicide,” the third most-cited article in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. She received the American Association of Suicidology’s Shneidman and Dublin awards, and is “Fellow” of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Gerontological Society of America.