Cat Ladies Have 50% Higher Risk of Suicide
Denmark – in a large study consisting of 45,000 people, researchers in the Scandinavian country found that women who own cats, or ‘cat ladies’, are 1.5x more likely to commit suicide including violent forms such as with guns, jumping off locations, etc.
“We can’t say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies. We plan to continue our research into this possible connection,” says Dr. Teodor T. Postolache, the senior author of the paper.
The study is bound to generate controversy but the researchers substantiate their findings based on scientific observations: women are more likely to own cats as pets and that exposure increases the chance of contracting the T. gondii parasite.
It is this parasite which researchers suspect alters a person’s behavior and may be the link for the increase in suicides they observed in their sample.
Readers on the Telegraph web site were quick to jump on that point and really claw into the stereotype of the “crazy cat lady.”
“Could it just be that lonely single people are in fact more prone to depression and hence suicide attempts?” asked one Telegraph reader.
“In my experience, many women own cats because they are mentally and emotionally immature,” harped another know-it-all. “The cat is used as an ideal for the partner she will never find… compliant, doting, easily manipulated and (of course) unable to challenge the woman’s motives.”
They have said that more research is needed.
Cat Ladies More Likely To Commit Suicide: Study
