Defying Male Suicide Logic

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2013-10-23 17:54

Article here. Excerpt:

'Suicide is the number one killer of young men in the UK, with 4552 male suicides in 2011, 75% of all suicides. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data also shows that male suicide rates are climbing among older men who are aged 45 to 59-years-old. With such striking figures, I do wonder why male suicide is not seen as the public health emergency that it actually is.
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The logic of our response to male suicide is difficult to untangle. Perhaps this is because the scandal has been going on for so many years that we tend to look away from what is an unsettling reality. It is not newsworthy. There is also our shameful history of past criminalisation of suicide, and like other issues linked to mental health, suicide is still very much stigmatised. Not to mention the traditional British "stiff upper lip" approach to male distress, which is only slowly being challenged in recent times. Then there is the old slight of hand: "but men use more violent means to kill themselves," as if this could explain it all away. So we end up downplaying the enormous differences that exist between men and women when it comes to the topic of suicide.'

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Comments

This author is out to lunch. It's good he's mentioning the fact that men commit suicide much more than women, but that's about where the good ends. He's making this out to be a great unfathomable mystery. It's no mystery -- men are dealt with badly, discriminated against, treated as utilities rather than human beings, and generally exploited. If the author would only look at what it means to be a man in modern American or UK society, he would have a very clear answer: for many men, life is not worth living in such difficult and inhospitable conditions.

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Submitted by redwoodwriter on Thu, 2013-10-24 06:02