Help at last for suicidal young men,
That message came across loud and clear in an article by Anthony
Browne that got published in The Observer, Sunday, March 4, 2001.
More males in their twenties die by their own hand than in car
crashes. MPs are demanding action to stem the tide
Somebody wrote to me and suggested that one of the sentences in the article would make
for a good quote that should be used frequently:
The suicide rate for young men has doubled since the
early Eighties, while for women it has almost halved.
No doubt, it is a good quote but it doesn't tell the whole story. A picture is
worth a thousand words and tells the story even better. The quote will make people
remember what the circumstances are that prompted Anthony Browne to write his article.
The table from which the
preceding graphs were constructed
is located at the end of my comments
I don't want to run down the article too much, because it is good, but neither the good
quote nor the article that contains it will do much to bring the picture out into the
open. Still, the article is a very good start. Let's hope that the most serious and most
deadly problem symptom of all that affect men, and thereby all of society, will receive
enough concern to make the article the first one in a long series.
However, even that is not enough to make a dent in the fundamental issue; showing trend
lines for suicide rates will. If anyone wants to do anything about it, keep those trend
lines in view at all times. Bring them up in TV programs, in every article that is being
written, on the Internet, on every single men's web site, put them on bill boards, on
posters, on T-shirts, on cigarette packages, and in newspaper- and magazine articles.
Who the heck cares how many people smoke themselves to death. Add an extra line to the
warning messages about smoking and show that, although smoking kills people, it doesn't by
far kill as many as suicide does. Suicide kills hundreds of times more men than the number
of people who get killed from smoking. (Now, that is a damned good slogan.) All we need to
do is determine the exact figures for each country. That is not
hard to do. The only thing is that it is a lot more work than one man can do by himself.
However, to drive the message home into the minds of the journalists who should be
writing about it and don't, make sure that the trend lines unmistakably show what the
trends are for women and for men. Without that the whole effort would be in vain.
...The All Party Group on Men's Health is so alarmed
that in its inaugural meeting it will press for measures to ensure that suicidal young men
can find help. The launch is being supported by Public Health Minister Yvette Cooper....
Where were all of these people during the last fifty years? On the Moon? The suicide
rates for men have been increasing steadily since the mid-fifties. It took these people
fifty years to become concerned. If they don't change the way in which they are going
about "helping men," it will be at least another fifty years before the suicide
rates for men will begin to fall once more — and perhaps another 150 years before
they are back to where they were fifty years ago.
Sure, suicidal men need help, but that is only addressing problem symptoms, not the
roots of the problem. The case of Mike Whitaker, which Anthony Browne
wrote about, illustrates beautifully what I mean. If he had not left a suicide note, and
if he had crashed his car, his death would have been written off as another traffic death.
How many traffic deaths are suicides? How many job accidents are suicides? How many
accidental deaths of men are not accidental at all?
Do any of the people who propose that suicidal men need help and counseling also
propose how such men will be detected? No. They don't, they won't and they can't. They
can't because that is not possible. What needs to be done is something that will make men
proud of themselves once more, to give them a purpose in life, so that they will never
even dream of committing suicide.
Start by removing the funding that presently, at the rate of hundreds of billions of
dollars per year, goes into manufacturing and promoting the most massive hate-propaganda
campaign against a visible minority in the history of mankind.
Without any doubt, men have become second-class citizens to the same extent that the
Jews were in Nazi-Germany. Identical tactics but far more efficient ones are being used
now to bring that about for men.
Let's talk about the fact that the life expectancy of the world's men is on average
five years less than that of women, that the gap between the life expectancies of the
sexes in the developed nations has widened from one year in 1920 to six years now. Does
anyone in his right mind believe that is due to the biological inferiority of men? How do
they explain that men's biology changed that much in merely 80 years?
Let's talk about the fact that in the whole world there are now 280 million men and
boys that are not amongst the living but should be if men were to experience the same
risks to their lives that women experience. What about a little gender equality in that area?
... Howard Stoate, chairman of the men's health group,
said: 'It's the commonest cause of death among young men. It's an important issue and is
under-recognised - most people have no idea it is so high - but the statistics are
shocking.'...
Of course they are shocking. We can only be shocked by something that surprises us. Why
did all of these people learn about the issue only now? That they didn't care before this,
and that they still haven't got a clue what to do about it, is not shocking at all. It is
a travesty. It is a travesty because they and many others like
them vilified and demonized men for so long now and are then surprised at the
consequences. Can people become more bigoted than that? For fifty years they have done
their best to increasingly drive men to the brink of suicide, have left them with nothing
to like about life and the society that men live in and then are shocked that more and
more men kill themselves.
Dr Ian Banks, chairman of the Men's Health Forum ...:
'If this rate of death among young men was an infection, there would have been a lot more
attention paid to it.'
Dr. Ian Banks is blind to the fact that if women's suicide rate instead had climbed as
fast in the 1950's as men's began to climb, it would never have
been permitted to reach even a fraction of the magnitude men's suicide rate reached.
Simon Armson, chief executive of the Samaritans, said
that this refusal to talk about problems is a key reason why men are more likely to kill
themselves than women. 'They are more likely to internalise feelings until it gets
too big a burden to bear, and then it leads to self-destruction. The British culture of
stiff upper lip still reigns supreme,' he said. The Samaritans ha[d] tried to target men
by advertisements on beer mats and in changing rooms.
Sure, that's going to do a lot of good. How much did it bring the suicide rate down?
Ha! First of all, it will get the attention only of those men who see the beer mats. That
would be primarily men who drink beer. Is it only beer drinkers who commit suicide?
However, Simon Armson is quite mistaken if he thinks that it is the British culture of
"the stiff upper lip" that's behind it all. He should take a look at suicide
rates in other countries and learn that the British culture is by far not the worst with
respect to men's suicide rates. The UK ranks 55th out of 97 countries the World Health
Organization reported on. The suicides rates for men in the top-ranking three countries
are six to seven times higher than those in the UK. (See International Suicide Rates)
He should also take a look at those cultures in which the suicide rates of men are the
lowest. Furthermore, he should look at those cultures in which they are even lower than
those of women. Maybe he can learn something from those cultures, namely that the Brits
are not the only ones with a culture of "the stiff upper lip" and that a far
more important factor contributing to men's suicides is the extent to which a given
culture respects and appreciates its men instead of considering them heartless and
unfeeling rapists, brutes and batterers, which virtually no men in any society are.
...There is a huge range in suicide rates among
different groups of men. It is far higher - and rising - among unskilled men than among
professional men.
No guesses at all why that is? Could it be possible that these unskilled men who killed
themselves where destitute because they couldn't earn enough money for themselves and
their families on account of the job market being flooded with women who like to have a
career?
Men these days are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. It doesn't
matter to anyone whether they have to provide for a family or not. If they are
paying child support, it'll be quite a while - if at all - before their being laid off will be taken
into account and their payments adjusted accordingly.
What about the huge differences in suicide rates between groups of men who are happily
married and those who are not, those who have work and those who have not, those who are
being driven into bankruptcy and those who are not, those whose children are being taken
from them, those who lost their jobs because of various reasons connected with their
divorces and their persecution by the legal system, and those who are being jailed for
being in abject poverty and can't possibly meet the demands for outrageous child support
amounts?
Would it not have been a good idea to look at a random sample of suicide cases of
"unskilled" men to find out what attributes all of their cases had in common?
Men are more likely to kill themselves if they are from
ethnic minorities, unmarried or gay.
Right there the theory of the "British stiff upper lip" gets blown out of the
water. However, right there is another avenue of exploration. How about checking to what
extent those suicide rates compare to those of the men in the countries those men came
from. If they are not identical and if all or most of them are higher in the UK than they
are in those men's home countries, then that would be direct proof that the problem is not
with the men who kill themselves but with the society that forces them to commit suicide.
What are the plans of the Men's Health Group in that regard, or have they not
progressed yet past the voicing of good but mistaken intentions?
Psychol[o]gists say that the rise in suicide among men
is a result of their loss of a role in society.
It takes neither a rocket scientist nor a psychologist to figure that one out, but it
still only discusses a problem symptom. What is the cause of men's loss of their role?
Determine what that is, address it, fix it, and there'll be virtually no more suicides.
...his father, John Peters, who
teaches psychology and works for the self-help group Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide.
'Many men have expectations they should be providers, and for a small percentage they
don't live up to it.'
See what I mean? Even the father of a suicide victim, a psychologist specializing in
counseling the surviving friends and relatives of suicide victims, can't figure it out,
although he'll no doubt be able to make the survivors feel good about themselves. He is
incapable of seeing the forest for the trees. He can't see the contradiction between what
he's is saying and the circumstances of his son's death. His son should have been happy
not to have to support his excessively demanding ex any longer. Doesn't anyone wonder why
the man became so disturbed about the loss of a role (which his wife thought he was lousy
at) that he up and killed himself? I'm afraid that is one psychologist who hasn't got any
answers. He is far more likely to be part of the problem.
...[Dr. Ian] Banks. 'There are many practical things we
can do. Changing men's attitudes to themselves is a long-term job, but it's not
impossible.'
Boy oh boy, what an attitude! That's insane and ludicrous.
Here is a dose of reality: The attempts to change men resulted in them losing their
role. We still expect men to make further changes to themselves, to have them adapt, now
that we have taken men's role away from them, and to have men accept the hard reality of
being useless.
Let me ask Dr. Banks and anyone else who thinks that men need to change more than they
already have what they do when they feel cold in their homes. Do they lower their body
temperature to change their bodies' attitudes with respect to the uncomfortable room
temperature so that they may feel relatively comfortable? Of course not, they put another
log on the fire, crank up the thermostat, put on another sweater or jacket...
If we can accept the absolute reality of our bodies' biochemistry and the standard body
temperature that comes along with it, and if we adjust the environment in which the body
exists, so that the body is comfortable, why can't we do the same for men?
Can't we accept that men are men and adjust the social environment for men to become at
least as comfortable as it is for women? Can we not go one extra step and have men and
women agree that they are both entitled to the same level of social comfort? Can we then
go one more step and have men and women agree that if they live in harmony that that will
make it much easier for them to work something out which will permit both men and women to
live equally in comfort in the same society?
However, that requires mutual respect — and perhaps then a little love can grow as
well. Unfortunately, there is no respect anymore for men, not by society, not by many
women, not by most feminists, and not even by many men themselves. Most of all, it
requires that all of society admits that it severely and lethally discriminates against
men. Still, without having any respect for men, very few people can even see that much.
Therefore the suicide rates for men will keep rising inexorably, despite any and all
well-intentioned programs to make better men out of men or even to create nebbish men who
won't, it is hoped, kill themselves any longer.
Men are men, and no extent of re-engineering human nature will change that. Fool around
with nature and you'll be courting disaster. Fool around with human nature, and one of the
many disasters you'll get will be a rising epidemic of suicides.
Walter H. Schneider
Fathers for Life
PS. Suicide statistics for the US, Australia, Canada
and various other countries
See also:
Men behaving sadly – Information about and advice on depression, by the Royal College of Psychiatrist (U.K.)
Men [in the U.K.] are around three times more likely than women are to kill themselves. Suicide is commonest amongst men who are separated, widowed or divorced and is more likely if someone is a heavy drinker.
Mind you, the article advises that anyone should not get
upset if he can’t sleep - "Do something restful that you enjoy, like
listening to the radio or watching television." Especially for men,
that does not seem to be the best cure for depression. Television and
its never-ceasing male-bashing programs and commercials are more likely to
bring depression on or to aggravate it than to cure it.
However, here, for the first time in many years, in almost a decade in fact,
is an article that identifies male suicide in the U.K. as a problem that is
being ignored and needs to be solved:
The silent epidemic
of male suicide, By Dan Bell, Feb. 4, 2008, BBC News. Incongruously, the
article was published at the BBC website, while the BBC is one of the major
promoters of "news" and other male-bashing items that contributed over the
years to the escalating epidemic of male suicides.
| Suicide
rates 1 : by gender and sex
(sic — I guess they meant 'by age and sex') |
| United Kingdom |
Rate
per 100,000 population |
|
|
1971 |
1976 |
1981 |
1986 |
1991 |
1997 |
| Males |
|
|
|
|
|
|
15-24
|
6.9 |
9.6 |
10.6 |
12.7 |
15.9 |
16.4 |
25-44
|
13.5 |
15.0 |
19.5 |
20.1 |
24.3 |
21.8 |
45-64
|
19.8 |
21.0 |
23.1 |
22.6 |
20.4 |
17.5 |
65 and over
|
25.4 |
23.8 |
23.7 |
26.4 |
18.4 |
15.4 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Females |
|
|
|
|
|
|
15-24
|
3.3 |
4.6 |
3.4 |
3.4 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
25-44
|
7.7 |
8.9 |
7.7 |
6.6 |
5.9 |
6.2 |
46-64
|
15.9 |
14.3 |
15.0 |
12.0 |
8.2 |
6.9 |
65 and over
|
16.5 |
15.0 |
15.5 |
13.6 |
8.6 |
6.3 |
|
1 Includes deaths undetermined
whether accidentally or purposely inflicted. Age-standardised to the European population.
Source: Office for National Statistics;
General Register Office for Scotland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
The UK Office for National Statistics continues:
Deaths from suicide have fluctuated widely
over time. The highest rates occurred around 1931 when rates for the older age groups were
considerably higher than those of the youngest. There has been a marked increase in
suicide death rates in people aged 15 to 24 since the end of the 1950s. Between 1971 and
1997 the suicide death rate for men aged 15 to 24 rose from 6.9 per 100,000 population to
16.4 per 100,000 population. For women in this age group there was a fall from the
mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and the rate was 4.0 per 100,000 population in 1997. Suicide
among men aged 25 to 44 has risen since the 1950s to a level higher than among any other
group. Rates among those over the age of 44 have declined. Suicide rates are associated
with mental health problems, such as depression.
The preceding text is all of the information that the Office for National
Statistics provides with the table. The table served to construct the graphs that
are shown at the beginning of this page.
What is remarkable is what is not said in the text and what could have
been shown in the table, or, better yet, what could all have been shown in a graph that
could have contained all of the data that they had on hand to produce the table and the
comment following it. They would even have saved some space, and people would not
have to play any guessing games as to what it is that the government of the United Kingdom
didn't want them to know.
Why not just show people all of the data for the last century? It
could have been done. I'm sure that the people would have loved to see those trends.
I'm also sure that they would have been perfectly capable of drawing their own
conclusions without the Office for National Statistics telling them in writing in the
notes following the table what it is that the table contains and what they wish people to
read into the data. Surely, anyone who can read well enough to comprehend those
inane comments is smart enough to read a few numbers in the table and to comprehend them
as well. Maybe the staff of the Office of Statistics aren't smart enough to
understand that.
People interested in the suicide statistics would love to see all of them,
to understand to what extent their lives improved during the past century.
Most importantly, they must love to see to what extent life in
the UK improved during the latter part of the century, when feminism came into power and
gradually made all of the promises contained in the Communist Manifesto a reality.
They must surely want to see whether the wide disparity between the suicide
rates of the sexes held true during all of the past century, even during the time when
women where so terribly oppressed.
Maybe there is something about those numbers that the government of the
United Kingdom doesn't want its citizens to know. That couldn't possibly be true in
the land that gave democracy to the world, or could it? What in the world is it that
makes life in the United Kingdom so depressing that people prefer to kill themselves in
record numbers and at unprecedented rates, rather than to enjoy all of the blessings that
half a century of ever more powerful Marxist feminist rule brought about?
What were things like during the first seventy years of the last century?
Why are the citizens of the UK not permitted to see that? Would it bother
them if they did? Could it be that they would begin to understand that feminism is
deadly?
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,446298,00.htmlMore males in their twenties die by their own hand than in car
crashes.
MPs are demanding action to stem the tide
Anthony Browne
Sunday March 4, 2001
The Observer
The soaring suicide rate among young men, which means they are now more likely to die
by their own hand than be killed in a car crash, will this week be confronted by a new
parliamentary committee set up to investigate the scale of the tragedy.
The suicide rate for young men has doubled since the early Eighties, while for women it
has almost halved. Suicide is now the biggest single cause of death of men aged 25 to 34,
who are more than five times likely to take their lives as women of the same age,
according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The All Party Group on Men's
Health is so alarmed that in its inaugural meeting it will press for measures to ensure
that suicidal young men can find help. The launch is being supported by Public Health
Minister Yvette Cooper. Howard Stoate, chairman of the men's health group, said: 'It's the
commonest cause of death among young men. It's an important issue and is under-recognised
- most people have no idea it is so high - but the statistics are shocking.'
Overall, suicide has overtaken car accidents as a cause of death among men. Each year
about 3,600 men take their lives, compared to 1,200 women. Dr Ian Banks, chairman of the
Men's Health Forum, which advises the Government, said: 'If this rate of death among young
men was an infection, there would have been a lot more attention paid to it.'
The new measures will come too late to help Mike Whitaker, who
seemed to have everything to live for. He was in his last year of a chemistry degree at
Bath University and was expected to get a first. He had a job lined up, a girlfriend and
was captain of the clay pigeon shooting team. 'He was very successful at whatever he did.'
said his mother, Jenny Whitaker.
But one morning at the end of the Christmas break, Jenny awoke to find the car gone,
while her husband found the back door open. Then they saw a one-line handwritten note
against the bedroom door of Mark's younger brother: 'Sorry bro - look after Mum and Dad.'
Half an hour later the police found him in the car with a pipe from the exhaust to the
window.
'We were astounded. We knew he was upset about a university project, but we had no idea
he was that ill.' said his mother. 'He was a perfectionist and did keep things to himself.
He hadn't spoken to anyone about being desperately distressed.'
Simon Armson, chief executive of the Samaritans, said that this refusal to talk about
problems is a key reason why men are more likely to kill themselves than women. 'They are
more likely to internalise feelings until it gets too big a burden to bear, and then it
leads to self-destruction. The British culture of stiff upper lip still reigns supreme,'
he said. The Samaritans has tried to target men by advertisements on beer mats and in
changing rooms.
Declan Curran, 13, hanged himself from a door with a guitar strap. He had been sexually
abused and had no one he could talk to. 'As a lad you have to be tough, and if you're not
you're a bit of an outcast,' said his brother Liam. There is a huge range in suicide rates
among different groups of men.
It is far higher - and rising - among unskilled men than among professional men. Men
are more likely to kill themselves if they are from ethnic minorities, unmarried or gay.
Psycholgists say that the rise in suicide among men is a result of their loss of a role
in society. Dale Peters, a market trader selling plants and flowers, hanged himself at 25
after splitting up with his girlfriend. 'He found it difficult to see where he was going.
He was ticking over with a small business, but he wasn't doing particularly well
- he didn't see a future for himself,' said his father, John Peters, who teaches
psychology and works for the self-help group Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. 'Many
men have expectations they should be providers, and for a small percentage they don't live
up to it.'
Males are falling behind females at school and university. The loss of unskilled jobs
has hit men with few educational qualifications particularly hard. 'Young men cannot see
what their role is, and often their parents cannot see what their role is,' said Peters.
'The men can be perfectly sane in coming to that decision. For so many it is a very
determined act.'
More women than men attempt suicide each year, but are less likely to succeed. They
usually choose methods such as an overdose of pills which can often be tackled in casualty
wards, and are often seen as pleas for help.
Men tend to choose violent, decisive methods, such as hanging, jumping off buildings,
crashing a car or shooting themselves.
'There's fatalism about the whole thing. People say they're going to do it anyway, but
that's just not true,' said Banks. 'There are many practical things we can do. Changing
men's attitudes to themselves is a long-term job, but it's not impossible.'
anthony.browne@observer.co.uk |
Right, it appears that we must re-educate men to accept
second-class-citizen status and that women rank higher than they do.
It seems that the powers feel that once we get men to accept the
inevitable, they will then stop killing themselves and blissfully engage
in their duty to become indentured servants to the superior class of
citizens, without even receiving the slightest bit of the honour and
veneration they once-upon-a-time received for doing the dirty, dangerous,
unhealthy and sweaty jobs as providers and protectors of the families from
which they are being now increasingly often expunged.
See also:
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