The male suicides: Social perfectionism is killing men — and things are getting worse

[Bonobo]

2. This is an important subject.

"In every country in the world, male suicides outnumber female. The mystery is why? What is it about being male that leads to this? Why, at least in the UK, are middle-aged men most at risk? And why is it getting worse?

For O’Connor, too, the intent question remains open. “I’m unaware of any decent studies that have looked at it because it’s really difficult to do,” he says. But Seager is convinced. “For men, I think of suicide as an execution,” he says. “A man is removing himself from the world. It’s a sense of enormous failure and shame. The masculine gender feels they’re responsible for providing and protecting others and for being successful. When a woman becomes unemployed, it’s painful, but she doesn’t feel like she’s lost her sense of identity or femininity. When a man loses his work he feels he’s not a man.”

It’s a notion echoed by the celebrated psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister, whose theory of suicide as ‘escape from the self’ has been an important influence on O’Connor. “A man who can’t provide for the family is somehow not a man any more,” says Baumeister. “A woman is a woman no matter what, but manhood can be lost.”

In 2014, clinical psychologist Martin Seager and his team decided to test the cultural understanding of what it means to be a man or woman, by asking a set of carefully designed questions of women and men recruited via selected UK- and US-based websites. What they found suggests that, for all the progress we’ve made, both genders’ expectations of what it means to be a man are stuck in the 1950s. “The first rule is that you must be a fighter and a winner,” Seager explains. “The second is you must be a provider and a protector; the third is you must retain mastery and control at all times. If you break any of those rules you’re not a man.” Needless to say, as well as all this, ‘real men’ are not supposed to show vulnerability. “A man who’s needing help is seen as a figure of fun,” he says. The conclusions of his study echo, to a remarkable degree, what O’Connor and his colleagues wrote in a 2012 Samaritans report on male suicide: “Men compare themselves against a masculine ‘gold standard’ which prizes power, control and invincibility. When men believe they are not meeting this standard, they feel a sense of shame and defeat.”

I have lost at least 3 friends to suicide. All men.