speculated that the gender-related differences he found in his previous studies [60,61] were due to societal attitudes towards women and to different thinking in women that brought them to seek help and decrease their social isolation. In fact, what was rendering men vulnerable to the effect of alcohol on suicide (independence and loss of interpersonal support) was opposite to what women endorsed (interrelatedness and help seeking). Obviously, Murphy’s finding is limited to Western societies as trends may be reversed in non-Western societies, such as Papua New Guinea [62]. However, in a later study conducted in Canterbury, New Zealand, Conner et al. [63] failed to detect an effect of gender in mediating the association between alcohol dependence and serious suicide attempts. The issue is still open.
.In a study of 450 alcohol-dependent men conducted in the mid-eighties, suicide attempts predicted increased alcohol-related problems at one-year follow-up [69], but this has not been confirmed in later studies [70–72]