The method is the whole story. Women attempt more; men die more because a firearm is almost always fatal and pills usually are not ¹. A gun in the home roughly triples the odds that someone living there dies by suicide ². After a first handgun purchase the raised risk shows within a month and lasts years, all of it firearm suicide; the gun adds a fast lethal option rather than replacing a slow one ³.

The window is short. Among people who survived a serious attempt, nearly half acted within ten minutes of deciding ⁴; about one in four deliberated under five ⁵. Drinking in the hours before raises the odds of an attempt roughly sevenfold ⁶. Add depression and an alcohol use disorder and lifetime risk runs near one in six ⁷.

The move that matters is temporary. When a man in the house is in a hard stretch, get the fast method out of reach for a while.

The good outcome is invisible.

• That week: almost nothing changes. He goes to work; the drawer is just empty. That is the point; the bad ending never arrives.
• That month: the acute crisis dissolves the way most do, through sleep, time, and contact, while a first appointment gets room.
• Years out: when Britain switched off toxic town gas, suicides fell about 30% and stayed down, with no substitution to another method ¹¹. One household's version is one man still alive.

Where it lands hardest: divorced men carry over twice the rate of married men, with no matching rise for divorced women ¹³. Job loss, a custody ruling, and a parent's death are brief spikes. The person with the most leverage is whoever holds a key to his house.