Men: good for women's mental health, but not so great for their own.

Strong, Silent and suicidal
http://www.savethemale.co.uk/

WE MAY NOT be able to multitask, we're the laughing stock of every
other TV commercial and we are, almost certainly, no longer strictly
necessary for breeding, but there is one thing at which men are a whole
lot better than women: killing ourselves.

Forget war, punch-ups, heroin, booze, car crashes and any other
misconceptions: suicide is now the biggest killer of men in the UK
between 15 and 35.

The point is made graphically in a startling new poster campaign
featuring a gigantic Union Jack overprinted with these words: "Since
the start of the war 102 young British men have been killed in Iraq.
Since the start of the war 3,054 young British men have killed
themselves in Britain."

It's the work of an organisation called Calm - the Campaign Against
Living Miserably - which, after several years as a little-known
government-funded pilot project, is now standing on its own two feet as
a charity and expanding to offer its free online and telephone helpline
services nationwide.

Its website (thecalmzone.co.uk) is deliberately as much about music and
lifestyle as it is mental health. Men may need help, but you have to
fool them into asking for it - the project was set up by the Department
of Health in 1997 after a study discovered that young men would rather
be seen dead than turn for help to such organisations as the Samaritans
and SaneLine.

Big boys, you see, don't cry.

Small surprise, then, that when Calm went nationwide at the beginning
of April it did so with the slogan "Being silent isn't being
strong".

Things started to go wrong for men in the early Seventies - at about
the same time, funnily enough, as women's liberation began to change
the world. By 1979 the suicide rate for women in the UK was dropping
sharply, and carried on dropping through the Eighties and Nineties,
whereas the rate for men was steadily climbing. By 2003, the suicide
rate for women was 5.8 suicides per 100,000; for men it was 18.1.

It doesn't help, of course, that men are just so damned good at it.
Whereas the exit of choice for most women is the notoriously unreliable
overdose, when a man's gotta go he really goes for it, hanging his
shattered hopes on a rope. And hanging is a method seldom mistaken as a
cry for help.

The changes and advances that have taken place for women over the past
30 to 40 years have been enormous, but in the rush to equality and
beyond no-one has much bothered to help men to adjust to the new world
order. And if young men are not expected to be the breadwinners any
more, not expected to be the central person in the family and are not
even needed as biological fathers, what exactly is their role?

It's probably no coincidence that the suicide rate dropped during
both world wars, when a man's purpose was clearly defined. Now that
traditional male roles are becoming increasingly unnecessary, and even
despised, men are at a loss.

The situation is as bad, or worse, in other western countries. Michael
Dudley, chairman of Suicide Prevention Australia, told a conference in
Sydney this month that Australian men were four times as likely to kill
themselves as women. Men, he said, "have a stoic kind of attitude and
tend to think of emotional problems as some kind of moral problem or a
character failing. They just try to tough it out."

Of course, there's an alternative explanation for the disparity in
suicide rates. A study of 293 female students by psychologists at the
State University of New York in 2002 discovered that those who were
regularly "directly exposed to semen" were less depressed, thanks
to the absorption of mood-altering hormones.

Men: good for women's mental health, but not so great for their own.

.

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