This statistic "with the advent of no-fault divorce, divorces went up, but female suicide rates dropped by 20%" seems very surprising to me. By googling I haven't been able to find a source for it. If I look at women's suicide rates over time they seem to be trending up. No fault divorce starts in California in 1969 and is legal in the last state, New York, by 2010. If that causes a significant drop in suicide rate I can't see it on this graph.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...

Additional Googling has turned up for me a paper that gives the 20% reduction claim. Still not clear to me how a 20% reduction in female suicide does not show up in a chart of female suicide rate.

Another interesting thing about this paper is that it references another paper that found the opposite result - i.e. that no fault divorce seems to have increased the suicide rate.

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=104...

I tried to find suicide rate in California specifically around 1970. Ideally, I'd like to see a graph going from 1950 to 1990 and see that there is a ~20% drop around the legalization of no fault divorce. I found this paper that does mention a big drop in California suicide rate, especially among women and teens, between 1970 and 1990.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-278X.1994....

This paper does not attribute the drop in suicide rate to no fault divorce though. As I understand it this paper is saying that the suicide rate drop is explained by two main factors.

First, a change in how California coroners coded suicides relative to how other coroners did it. If I'm understanding correctly it seems in 1970 California coroners were inclined to mark deaths resulting from suicide attempt damage as suicide. Because of this, in 1970, California cities had about double the suicide rate of US cities. By 1990 California coroners were doing what other coroners were doing and California cities had effectively the same rate of suicide as US cities.

In my imagination this works as - if a woman attempts to kill herself by overdose, but survives the attempt, though has irreparable organ damage and dies from that a month later - in the 1970's California coroners would call that suicide, but by 1990 they would call it an unintentional death. Since men tend to kill themselves with guns or by hanging men tend to die when they attempt suicide. Women are more likely to try poisoning or drug over dose and thus are more likely to survive the attempt but take an eventually fatal injury. This would explain why women's suicidality is apparently more affected by a change in coroner practice than men's.

Second factor is changing demographics. American Indians are the most suicidal, then white people. Between 1970 and 1990 the proportion of these two groups declined and the number of the relatively not-suicidal Hispanics increased dramatically. Thus, the suicide rate in California will appear to plummet - not because of any change in behavior or policy, but simply because there are more less suicidal people moving in.

After reading about this for the last hour my current impression is that we probably don't know the affect of no fault divorce on female suicide rates. The academic literature is contested (I've seen two papers on the specific point with opposite claims), the statistics are not clear (female suicide rate is trending up), and in the state with the sharpest change in suicide rate following no fault divorce legalization (to my knowledge this is California) there are other explanations for the change.