UK: Time To Change Our Attitudes To Men And Boys

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last month the Time to Change campaign released findings showing that if fathers talked about their own mental health problems it would encourage 70% of teenagers to feel able to do so themselves. Their research showed that a quarter of 16-18 year old young men experience mental health issues on a weekly basis. Later this month, as part of CALM’s work with the Huffington Post series ‘Building Modern Men’ throughout November, we’ll be releasing details of our own Masculinity Audit, which shows that men who’ve been very depressed are less likely than women to talk to anyone about it (55% of men compared to 67% of women).

Scarcely a week passes without a great article about male mental health, and the call for men to talk has been now been adopted by every major mental health charity, alongside LADbible, (#UOKM8? campaign) and UNILAD who have all taken to encouraging men to talk and seek help when they need to. And Men’s Sheds have taken off. What’s all the fuss?

Official UK figures for suicide in 2015 aren’t due for release until 2017, but the Campaign Against Living Miserably, for the second year running, has pulled together ONS figures for England and Wales together with Northern Ireland and Scotland. These show that suicide remains the single biggest cause of death for men aged under 45 in the UK.

The detail is shocking. In Northern Ireland 48% of all deaths of males aged 15-24 were suicide, and that rose to 51% for men in the 25-34 age band. With all the post-vention work and recent money put into suicide prevention there, such figures are dreadful - and lead me to ask again, why no research into why do more men take their lives than women? The rest of the UK isn’t great either. Suicide accounted for 29% of all 15-24 year old male deaths in Scotland and 27% of the deaths of young men in England and Wales. So, tough times for young men.'