If you are a man in Britain the most likely thing to kill you before the age of 50 isn’t a heart attack, or a car crash, or cancer, or terrorism. It’s yourself. The greatest threat for your chances of seeing old age is your own mind.
Three quarters of all suicides are male.
There is no denying that the male suicide epidemic is being discussed more openly, and more publicly, than ever before. The current #project84 campaign, organised by mental health charity Calm, to start a conversation about male suicide is just the latest example, one which involved placing 84 sculptures on ITV buildings across London, to represent the 84 British men who take their lives every week.
For the last few years, celebrities and public figures have been open about their mental health battles. Only this morning I switched on the TV to watch Jonny Wilkinson discussing his experience with anxiety disorder, which will hopefully confuse the "man up" brigade enough to wonder how you can be a World Cup-winning rugby captain and still not be immune to a mental health condition. And it certainly feels a long way from the casually cruel treatment of mental illness, when the Sun reported Frank Bruno’s depression by screaming "Bonkers Bruno" on its front page.
I also feel a bit proud to have contributed to this change in attitudes in a tiny way with a book about my own experience of suicidal depression and anxiety, Reasons To Stay Alive. I can remember one bookshop event in particular where a 60-year-old man came up to me and broke down in tears and told me how the book had prompted him to talk about depression for the first time in his life. He’d had depression for 40 years. Many other books and TV programmes are out there with a familiar mantra: it’s good to talk.
And, sure, talking is obviously good. Talking externalises. Talking makes you feel less of a weirdo. For me, talking was like removing a metaphorical kidney stone. It was taking some internal agony and externalising it. It’s taking unreal feelings and planting them in reality. It’s taking ownership.
Talking is a necessary first step in breaking the stigma. Suicide has long been a taboo subject, which is ironic because the taboo is what makes it so lethal. Men are far less likely to seek medical help if they feel depressed and yet far more likely to turn to unhelpful solutions (famously, alcohol and drugs).
But what we really urgently need, if we want to combat suicide, is more than talk. We need to start talking mental illness seriously. It’s not just about getting celebrities to sit on daytime TV sofas. It’s about seeing the cultural roots of mental illness.
Yes. Suicide is cultural. It fluctuates not only between genders but between nations and eras. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction: all these are partly cultural too. We need to understand how culture can make us ill, how the pressures we place on ourselves can eventually crush us. Men still have the old pressures of identity, to be strong and successful and emotionally neutral and fully in control, like Dwayne Johnson, a hyper-masculine existential rock in the car chase of life. And we now have some new pressures too, pressures women have always known: the pressure to look good, to be perfectly groomed and gym-bodied, as if the only balance in life that matters is that between carb and protein, as if our shells are worth more than our souls.
Oh, and then you add the socialisation of media, where everyone is on eternal display, in their own knowing versions of The Truman Show, continually adding to their Instagrammed display of happiness, as if other people thinking you are happy is more important than actually being happy. We look at everyone’s best bits while being all too aware of our own crap bits.
Suicide figures have been growing, decade by decade. To reverse this trend we need to think bigger. Yes, we need more talk. Yes (yes, yes) we need more mental health funding as a matter of national emergency. But in the long run we need not only to put a sticking plaster over the wound. We also need to look at what’s causing the wounds in the first place. We need to change and broaden the idea of being a man. Yes, we’ve benefited as men from the patriarchy, but it’s damaged us too. We need to realise feminism is not the enemy. It is, in many ways, a solution. The narrow emotional range we have allowed ourselves needs a radical overhaul. We can’t simply be the tough, predatory alpha wolves of Wall Street. We need to allow ourselves other identities: as carers, as listeners, as talkers, as emotionally open, as capable of asking for help.
If this makes me a "beta male snowflake" that’s fine. I’ll take that over being dead.
We need to be strong enough to admit when we feel weak. Depression may be an inevitability in some cases, but suicide will never be. We can reduce it. All we need to do is change the world.
Notes on a Nervous Planet, the follow up to Reasons to Stay Alive, will be published in July
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