Ireland: Men’s place in society ignored in renewed media focus on suicide

Article here. Excerpt:

'You might think from the sudden outbreak of discussion about suicide that the problem had recently become worse. In fact, our suicide problem has – in particular aspects – been deeply serious for two decades.

Our recorded suicide rate doubled, from about 6 per 100,000 between the early 1980s and the turn of the millennium. Despite a significant growth in population during the Celtic Tiger years, the number of annual suicides has actually fallen slightly since then.
In 2011, the year for which the most complete recent figures are available, there were 525 suicides. Ten years earlier, in 2001, 519 suicides were recorded. Since the population grew dramatically in the intervening decade, it is difficult to understand why there is now an impression that suicide has recently been exhibiting a dramatic increase.
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Of these figures, more than four-fifths have consistently been accounted for by male suicides, and, of these, a grotesquely disproportionate number were young men. For years, the level of suicide among young Irish male adults has been close to the highest in Europe. The graph for female suicide has remained horizontal for decades.
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There is no talk about what happens to men when their relationships break down, or what role Irish society and its institutions might be playing in that. There is no discussion of the possibility that suicide is, in many cases – far from the act of a disordered mind – a radically rational way of dealing with a particular understanding of reality.
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But at least the Irish media has started to talk about the hippopotamus in the hallway. We have every reason to hope that the giraffes in the garret might come in for discussion in another decade or two.'