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Rapper Professor Green tells the BBC about his father’s suicide

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Rapper Professor Green has made a BBC film about his fathers’ suicide to increase awareness of suicide as the biggest killer of men aged 20-45 and raise funds for male suicide prevention charity, the Campaign Against Living Miserably.

He told the BBC: “Despair. It’s a powerful feeling, when your heads in a state it’s easy to feel like you are the only one in the world who’s suffering.”

Green talks about the difficult relationship he had with his dad, how at 18 they stopped talking, but then five years later he tried to arrange a meeting, but they ended up arguing and the last words he said to his dad were “I hate you”.

‘Suicide consumes everyone around that person’

He says: “The terrible thing is, I never got to see him, because a few months later he killed himself. The moment I found out my dada had taken his own life is still as clear today as it was the moment it happened.

“I kept wondering why no-one had seen it coming, I still find it quite hard to articulate how I felt. It’s been six years since it happened and weird thing about grieving is that it never stops.

“Suicide is now the biggest killer of men aged between 20 and 45 in the UK. Bigger than heart disease, bigger than road accidents and bigger than murder.

“The pain of a suicide ripples out to consume everyone around that person.

‘I still don’t know what was going through dad’s head’

“Communication can be a big problem between men. We don’t like to talk about our issues, we think it makes us look weak, or we think we can sort it all out ourselves.

“I still don’t know what was going through my dad’s head when he killed himself and I never got a chance to say a proper goodbye or tell him that I loved him.

“I wish there had been someone he felt he could have confided in or reached out to. That’s why I’m part of a campaign called CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably – an important charity that works hard to help prevent male suicide.”

The film also features comedian Jake Mills, who tells the story of his own attempted suicide and the story of the Stringer family who lost their musician son Hector when he was only 18 years old.

In 2013 6,233 people took their own lives in the UK, 4,858 of these were men. The film is available on BBC iplayer here.

Photo courtesy: Cristian Stefanescu

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Suicidal 18-year-old labeled ‘a drama queen’ by a doctor before he killed himself

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A harrowing story in the Telegraph over the weekend described how a severely depressed 18-year-old man — who made 40 attempts to take his own life — was labelled “a drama queen” by a doctor before he went on to kill himself.

That throw-away three-word quote, said more about the deep cultural prejudices that underpin male suicide than was mentioned in the rest of the article’s 1,500-words put together.

As an implicitly homophobic insult deployed to humiliate gay and straight men alike, the words encapsulate the gendered shame still imposed on young men who express weakness or distress.

The fact that men are humiliated for somehow being “less of a man” for showing emotion, goes a long way to explain why suicide is now the leading cause of death for 20 to 40-year-old men in the UK, a rate that’s three to four times that of women.

Young gay men even more at risk

But the implied homophobia of the insult also helps to explain why the suicide rate of young gay men is even higher still.

A 2012 survey by Stonewall Scotland, suggested gay men in Scotland were nearly eight times more likely to have attempted suicide in the past year than heterosexual men.

It seems that the further a young man deviates from the expected rules of the masculine role – to be tough, straight and stoical – the greater the shame that’s imposed upon him.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of a health professional effectively telling a young man at risk of suicide to “man up”.

Several years ago I reported on the suicide of a 26-year-old man from Manchester who’d hung himself in the woods by a motorway slip road.

His sister told me that when he had visited his GP, her brother was told to “pull himself together and not expect everyone to do everything for him”.

By Dan Bell

Photo courtesy: Mic445

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