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‘More UK men have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers killed since 1945’

by 9 Comments

More men in the UK have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945, according to a new edition of Newsweek magazine dedicated to the issue of male suicide.

The edition, which is published alongside an in-depth e-book on the crisis, follows new figures by the ONS that show men are now killing themselves at their highest rate for a decade.

According to Newsweek “Across Europe, men are around four times more likely to die by suicide than women” and suicide kills “three times more people than road accidents, more than leukaemia, more than all infectious and parasitic diseases combined.”

“More than 6,000 people in the UK died by suicide in 2013; 78% of them were men.”

Failure of services

In addition to a stark and detailed breakdown of the figures, the magazine outlines the failure of UK authorities to address the crisis.

The magazine reports, “In 2002, following the release of a report, The Sadness of Young Men, detailing Scotland’s disproportionately high male suicide rate, the Scottish government announced its intention to reduce suicide by 20% in the space of 10 years. When 2013 came around, rates were down by 19%.”

In London in November last year, a community-based mental health facility considered a lifeline to its members, was threatened with closure in a cost-cutting drive by the local council.

‘Provide and protect’

In early January, with the council’s decision still pending, one of its male members threw himself under a train, the magazine reports.

Newsweek quotes a number of the leading figures in the UK movement to address men’s mental health, including Jane Powell of the Campaign Against Living Miserably and Dr Martin Seager of Men’s Minds Matter.

Seager told the magazine that there is a danger in approaches to tackling men’s mental health that tells them they should me more like women.

He told Newsweek: “The way I look at it, if men have evolved as fathers, protectors and survivors, they are going to feel life is worth living to the extent they can provide and protect.”

Image credit: Newsweek

Article by Dan Bell

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  • Nigel

    Dan your quote just from Dr. Seager sums it up. I recall the book by Norah Vincent Self Made Man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book). In which she recounts her adventures from a year passing as a man. As with all jounalism rather uneven and with an eye to the sensational her concluding chapters. However her final chapters where she recounts both her subsequent depression and insights are moving and revealing. Herself a lesbian feminist she calls for men to organise for their own liberation. It has always stuck with me one of her final comments about men, “they are everywhere taking care of business while their insides liquify”. As she and so many others have observed traditional male roles are both emotionally demanding and are of the “where the buck stops” nature. I am so so glad that years of work is resulting in a glimmer of recognition that “men’s minds matter” . There is still a long journey to a place where “men matter” rather than the roles they fulfil.
    I sometimes wonder that it appears many of those women publicly speaking up for men have brothers. Perhaps more likely to see the boy and man as a human being rather than a “human doing”.
    In many ways mental health is where the strain of being the place where “the buck stops” shows. Suicide is both the tip of an iceberg and the literal end of the road. The tragedy is that men are more likely to reach the endv of the road. It is a judgement that they cannot ask for ,nor expect help. As Dr. Seager says we need to change that road.

  • karen woodall

    for me this is the clarion call for us to work together to push for a state of being in which we stop feminism in its tracks and bring to birth equality for men and for women allowing each to be just the way they are and removing barriers which are externally imposed and which cause this utterly tragic state of affairs.

    The independent last week ran a story that ‘femicide’ is a leading cause of premature death in women – totally fabricated and built on feminist lies – using their own proven to be false figures of 2 women dying every week at the hands of men that is 104 women per year – compare that to the thousands of women dying from cancer or in road accidents – it is a nonsense.

    This genocide of men because of the world feminists have forced upon them is not fabricated, it is real and the root cause is the way that women have created a world in which men are scapegoated, suffocated and shoe horned into roles they do not want, do not fit and do not do well in.

    These are utterly tragic statistics. We have to do something about this from a true equalities perspective and stop it in its tracks.

  • Nigel

    “85 women had been killed by their current or a former partner, compared to 24 men.” she writes and goes on to say”When women kill their male partners, it’s usually after they have suffered years of abuse from him” so the 24 dead men will have brought it on themselves!  Distasteful victim blaming of the worst kind. 
    Each death is a tragedy but in a population of millions a very rare tragedy.  I don’t normally read the Independant but does it usually ” make reason stare”? 
    As you say Karen it would be risible if it were not that this sort of total nonsense is from people Womensaid  with real power in formulating policy.  

  • Nick

    Thank you – interesting article from Newsweek in contrast to the sycophantic piece in the independent!

    I also followed the link to women’s aids campaign about ‘femicide’. Unbelievable overt hatred and smearing towards ‘men’ and distasteful use of tragic murders for their political goals and resonant of the toxic culture men face.

  • Paul Mills

    Many wise and considered and spot on words in the above responses. I just feel that the world is so skewed when it comes to what we focus on – what draws the political and media soundbites; and how we then focus time and scarce funds. It would be so interesting to see an accurate comparison actual numbers for individual high profile areas against spending and ‘media hype’. There must be a better way out there to manage these things!

  • Nigel

    The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (the Commission’s) Inquiry examined the available evidence in relation to the deaths of 367 adults with mental health conditions who died of ‘non-natural’ causes while in police cells or as detained patients over the period 2010-13, plus a further 295 who died in prison custody, many of whom also had mental health conditions.

    http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/publication/preventing-deaths-detention-adults-mental-health-conditions-executive-summary

    Significantly the report does not examine the gender of these 662 “adults”. However the vast majority were men. Not giving information on Gender or Race (two very pertinent issues) is particularly odd for a report from the EHRC which after all is charged with attention to the people with “protected characteristics” in the Equality Act.

    In the body of the report is notes the fact that the vast majority of prisoners have clinical problems. Significant in the light of both the differential sentencing of men (they are much more likely to be imprisoned and for longer than women for the same offence) and contentions that men who assault partners do so for “political” motivations (to oppress ) rather than as a result of other problems they may have.

    The most recent national data relates to 1997, where 92 per cent of male prisoners were reported to have one of the following five conditions: psychosis, neurosis, personality disorder, alcohol misuse and drug dependence. Seventy per cent had at least two of these.

    So either the 8% of the prison population without one of the five conditions are all in for Domestic Violence (as they are patriarchal terrorists) or in fact DV is connected to illness and dysfunction (which is of course the overwhelming Psychological evidence for both sexes) .

  • Healing Men

    I was struck by the reference in the article to trying to “make men more like women” to stop us killing ourselves.
    I reflected on this and it came to me that the Government can only respond in this way because, it seems to me, if the Government really did engage with why we kill ourselves then Government policies and feminism would, IMHO, be heavily implicated …. seems a bit of a bind to me … and the simple expediency …. “men are wrong and need to fix themselves” in response to us killing ourselves .. and this can only make matters worse.
    Then again, who cares?
    Feeling a bit sick.
    Where’s the EXIT?
    T

    • Inside MAN

      “Feeling a bit sick”. I hear you, brother. Dan