Real Men Kill Themselves Quietly…

Oliffe, J., Ogrodniczuk, J., Bottorff, J., Johnson, J., & Hoyak, K. (2010). “You feel like you can’t live anymore”: Suicide from the perspectives of men who experience depression Social Science & Medicine DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.057

I think that it is important when talking about a topic as complex and contested as male suicide, to avoid falling into the trap of making big statements that have no basis in fact. That is what has happened here, several times over, in this article by Oliffe et al. (2010). The authors (2010) commence the article with one incorrect statement, that is, that male suicide has been on the rise in Western countries (n.pag.). It has not. Despite occasional ebbs and flows, male suicide rates in most Western countries have remained constant over the past several decades. Changes in reporting measures, for one, can give the false impression that male suicide has spiked or plunged. The authors (2010) then make another incorrect statement, arguing that ‘depression in severe forms is arguably the highest risk factor’ for male suicide. That, of course, is the biggest myth of the suicide prevention industry, said so often with such Jesus overtones as to suggest that it is unmalleable truth, dropped from heaven.

What I did like about this article was that it raised the proposition that hegemonic masculinity (the ascription to masculine ideals), plays a critical role in explaining the highly gendered nature of suicide. In effect, the act of completing suicide is a masculine behaviour, wrapped up in silence, distress, the ‘reluctance to disclose emotional matters’ (2010), and the concealment of suicidal ideation. Yet again, I am painfully reminded that I am living in a total backwater of a country, Australia, where official government policy purposefully prohibits any discussion about the association between masculine ideals and male suicide. Even though those men most affected by suicide in Australia demonstrate the tensions that exist between masculine ideals and suicidal ideation, for example, men who have lost their jobs or who are otherwise excluded from labour market participation, our government continues to run with the lie that suicide is a genderless phenomenon, created by depression and treated with anti-depressants.

In their study of 38 men who were or who had been depressed, Oliffe et al. (2010) came up with the unspectacular but nonetheless important finding that men who contemplate suicide either connect with other people or become even more isolative. The argument flows that the former are less likely, the latter more likely to top themselves. Ditto, the latter would have been more susceptible to masculine ideals around self-reliance and to have employed ‘maladaptive coping strategies’ (2010) like, for example, numbing their intrapsychic pain through the bottom of a beer bottle. I can see some merit in that argument, but only to a point. The problem in the authors’ (2010) logic is that it is badly tainted by the presumption that suicidal ideation springs mostly from (undiagnosed) depression. Only by talking with men who have actually attempted and survived suicide could we ever start to get a handle on what might have been troubling these men. Other person reports and observations and the general lack of cause and effect between suicidal ideation (which is common) and completed suicides (which are not) cannot reliably tell us much at all.

Incorrect statements aside, this article (2010) does at least open the door to the possibility that the locus of causation for male suicide does not necessarily reside within the depressed brain but rather, that external factors also play a part. I would suggest, dang, I can hardly ever stop suggesting that hegemonic masculinity severely traumatises boys and men into feeling constrained within their own distressing emotions. The consequent absence of attachment to significant others leaves some men most vulnerable at those times when they most need to be comforted. Suicide prevention strategies, therefore, that do not address the influence of hegemonic masculinity on male suicide are invariably bound to fail…

‘The results…expose masculinities as mediating every juncture in men’s pathways toward and away from suicide, and, divisively perhaps, we predict that masculinities feature in the ‘black box’ manifests detailing the suicides of individual men as well as the disjuncture between men’s rates of depression and suicide. By better understanding and mobilizing what we know about how men construct masculinity with particular regard to experiencing and reacting to suicidal ideations, we sincerely hope to help address the problem of suicide among men’ (2010)…