Originally, I was going to write this article about purely about suicide, the issue of male suicide has bothered me a lot because one rarely sees any advertising targetted towards male suicides and if one find an article about it, it usually follows the pattern of, “poor woman/girl needs help,” and “stupid man won’t admit he has a problem.”
While researching this article I found that only one country, in the 89 that record separatistics for men and women’s suicides, had a higher female suicide rate than male suicide rate. This country, France, though also had the largest difference of life expectancy between men and women making me suspect the veracity of the figures. Combining the ratios and averaging them out reveals that 3.9 men commit suicide for every woman typically around the world. Countries like Slovakia, Poland, the USA, Israel and Lithuania are among the worst hit with men topping themselves like it’s in fashion.
However, despite the figures suggesting that men were topping themselves left, right and centre, in Australia the breakdown for suicide as a cause if death between men and women was surprisingly similar. The following graph illustrates what I mean. Note that the proportion of men and women committing suicide looks like a much smaller difference than what it does in the actual death figures which I had to find separately.
Clik here to view.
Showing mortality rates by proportions is hiding the death toll of men.*
I’m not suggesting that this little statistical trick was motivated by malicious intent, I’ve got no evidence for that. But it does at the very least indicate sloppy academic work. The point of statistics is to make what isn’t easy to see, clearer to see. These statistics actually make something even harder to see: that men are dying in silence.
Clearly, it isn’t just suicide, men are four times more likely to die in traffic accidents, in violent assaults, men die more often from cancer, heart disease and just about everything. Yet, turn on the TV, listen to the radio, walk down the street. Observe the advertisements: breast cancer awareness, women get your free HPV vaccine (HPV actually kills more men than it does women), women get a free breast exam, women talk to your doctor about your health and fitness, women get help with managing your weight etc…
Do men not suffer from obesity? Do men not live 5 years less on average than women? Do men not need exercise and healthy eating? Do men not need to be vaccinated? Even Beyond Blue, on their website, still have erroneous information about men’s mental health, “From puberty onward, women are twice as more likely to experience depression than men.”
Not true, men are at least as likely as women to suffer from depression. However, because depression was first recognised as a problem with women it took a long time to realise that men have different symptoms to women for depression. That’s what has been filling the pages of academic journals for the last 10 years.
I’ve developed this list from upliftprogram.com to illustrate some of the differences in how depression manifests differently in men and women. This list is far from ideal because it doesn’t adequately explain that many of these symptoms are actually the same thing, but we use different words to describe them between the sexes. For example, the hair one needs to split to tell the difference between compulsive behaviour and procrastination is very fine indeed, but calling women compulsive isn’t something we usually do, it suggests she doesn’t have self-control and that’s a ‘no-no’ so we say women procrastinate because it’s more empowering for women to procrastinate than to simply acknowledge they’re effectively just as vulnerable as men in lacking impulse inhibition.
Clik here to view.
Men are often dismissed as just being losers rather than people in need of help
If you read that list of symptoms of men and thought, “I know an asshole/loser like that,” congratulations, you’re part of the reason why men commit suicide at a rate several times higher than the frequency of women. We are conditioned to despise sick men. We see them as weak losers who need to be punished for their social infractions. So we further their alienation which in turn furthers their anxieties, which in turn furthers their depression which in turn pushes up the male suicide rates. But not just the suicide rates, think about how many men kill themselves on the roads compared to women. Look at that list again. Were these men just drugged losers with no brains? Or were they damaged and rejected human beings? Sadly, the ones who need love the most are often the hardest to love, it’s a lot easier to love a woman than a man in our society.
Suicide rates for men have been increasing steadily in Australia since the 1960s. The following graph comes from the Suicide Prevention Taskforce which indicates that male mental health is in desperate trouble. The drop in suicide in the 1990s comes after the introduction of Australia’s Port Arthur gun laws, the problem is probably even worse today than it was then, but that lack of successful suicides from firearms is probably hiding how bad it is. How many traffic accidents involving a single man are actually suicides?
Clik here to view.
Men’s suicide rising, women’s hasn’t changed
I don’t have enough figures, I don’t have enough data, but I’m going to make an educated guess right here that once acknowledgement of the differences in symptoms of depression amongst men and women spreads from the scientific community out to the rest of society we are going to find out that depression is far more common amongst men than it is amongst women. I think we’re also going to find it has gotten worse since feminism made it not only socially acceptable to bash men, but made it cool to do so.
Remember what I said at the beginning of this article about health programs being based on the idea of “poor woman needs help,” and “stupid man won’t admit he has a problem.” Have you ever asked yourself why they lure women into looking after themselves by using free screening and vaccines, but just tell men to sort themselves out? Why doesn’t the government just publish the facts? Why do we keep bashing men? Why can’t we simply give people the facts about health instead of jumping to conclusions that all men are wilfully ignorant about their health? I was a med student, I know a lot more about the human body than most people and I can say anecdotally that women are just as wilfully ignorant about health as men are. It’s nothing specific about men, women aren’t more emotionally intelligent than men. They’re just not suffering from anxiety nearly as much as men are, as much as they’d like to think they are. The mortality statistics are just not in favour of the “poor female” hypothesis.
From that list of symptoms, is it not true that what a lot of people are calling “typical masculinity” or “testosterone poisoning” today are the symptoms of men with depression? How does being mentally sick become ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ in a society? Why are we tolerating the abolishment of men’s dignity? Feminists of all people should know about this sort of thing, they believe this happened to them before in the past, why aren’t they pointing out to everyone what is happening to the men? The answer is simple: feminists just don’t care about men.
Feminists just don’t care about men.
Incomprehensibly, even the feminists who notice the rise in ads that bash men still complain they’re hurting women more. Women can have depression and our society will accept them for it, it’s ok for a woman not to be able to cope. However, if men get depression, they might as well just kill themselves because no one if going to take a man who can’t cope seriously, he’s a loser and an arsehole; he deserves to die. Have we not all thought this about some man from time to time? Maybe we’re the arseholes.
If we are going to deal with the problem in men’s health, physically, but especially psychologically, we need to stop the man hate. Tell women who think women’s liberation is all about bashing men to shut-up because if they bashed blacks or Jews like that we’d sue them. Tell men who bash their masculinity to get some self-respect: their kindness, tenderness and love is part of being human, not part of some mythical feminine side. We need to stop having a double standard for men, we need to learn talk to men, not yell at them and scare them into doing what we want them to do. We need to build trust between men and society. We need to treat them with respect, as equals and give them the facts: being a man is far more dangerous than being a woman. The statistics are clear, men are more than twice as likely to die before retirement than women. When are we going to accept the statistics? When are we going to accept men?
* Total deaths does not include deaths of men and women over 64 years of age as these are hard to distinguish from natural causes rather than preventable deaths.
