A comparison of suicide notes written by men and women

ABSTRACT

Previous research using small samples and subjective judgments has failed to identify reliable gender differences in suicide notes. Suicide notes written by 166 women and 513 men collected by Edwin Shneidman were analyzed by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computer program. Six significant differences and four trends were identified. The suicide notes written by women had a higher percentage of words found in the dictionary, negations, words indicative of cognitive process, discrepancies and present tense verbs. The suicide notes of women seemed to have more content indicative of hopelessness, defeat-entrapment and falling short of internalized standards.

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Context and goals: Suicide notes from a linguistic point of view

Notes

¹Notes often contain numbers, addresses, abbreviations, and other words that are not necessarily in a dictionary.