Why Are Men Killing Themselves?

Men are also the victims of male violence.

I have written many articles on the subject of suicide in the past, because my beloved mother, Jean, killed herself in 1987 and I suffered suicidal depression during the months immediately before that tragedy ( although not since).

For quite a few years I have written nothing on the subject, because I have reached the point that I thought I was dishonouring my mother by continuing to write about it, and I was thoroughly weary of serving up my own experiences for public consumption, which are far behind me now. (If you are interested, the full story is told in my memoir ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’.)

However the suicide rates published this week can’t really be ignored since they show them to be at their highest since 1992

Suicide rates

This article records the bald fact, but makes no attempt to explain this appalling statistic. However it notes that three quarters of the suicides were males. Again, it makes no attempt to explain this. More than 6000 suicides were registered in England and Wales in 2023, with around 4,500 of them being men.

Mental illness does not discriminate between the sexes. However suicides are not always the result of mental illness. They are sometimes simply a outcome of an unbearably miserable, alienated or lonely life. And it seems that men more often end up in such a condition then women do. It’s worth examining this shocking graph, making a particular note of the vast gulf between the genders among the over 85’s.

Many guesses have been made about the reason why this disparity exists. The workaday cliche of ‘inability to talk about feelings’ is one, which I think is inadequate . I never stopped talking about my feelings when I was suicidal - for all the good it did me. Others cite the brittleness of male friendships compared with the stronger ties that seem to exist between women and the stronger family bonds that also typically exist between women and their children.

But there is another possible explanation. That men themselves, like the 150 women who die at their hands every years, are simply more victims of male violence.