(A Guest Article edited by the Men Are Human Staff)
Broadcast on 22 August 2018 in the UK (link here for UK TV licence fee payers), Dr Alexander ‘Xand’ Van Tulleken presented an episode of the BBC’s popular science series, Horizon, called “Stopping Male Suicide”, whose programme description promised to discover (my emphasis):
“why suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK – causing more deaths in this group than car accidents, and even more than cancer”
The programme is worth watching (if you can access it), but it is highly affecting and quite hard to watch at times (not surprisingly given the subject). The programme started with plenty of promise, first with a man describing how society treats men as a utility and sees suicide as ‘selfish’ (because it stops the man from being used by society). Then with Van Tulleken in a life-boat, noting something very shocking to most: that suicide is the number one killer of all men under fifty, more than even cancer and car accidents. He also notes that when he was younger he’d found:
“the idea of anyone trying to take their own life impossible to relate to”
But then he mentions financial worries and broken relationships and most importantly he explains that:
“I’ve got a son who lives thousands of miles away, which I feel very guilty about. I worry about him; I worry about his future.”
Crucially, the programme was then at pains to point out that, while depression is a risk factor and people with conditions such as bipolar disorder (BPD) are thirty times more likely to die than the general population:
“The majority of people diagnosed with a mental illness will never go on to attempt suicide”
This is a very key point, and it is worth keeping in mind: suicide is not predestined by mental illness, but it can be a big factor.
Ideology Sneaks Into the Documentary
Unfortunately, the hope I had that the programme might address these issues from a fresh perspective quickly faded as Van Tulleken went to interview the editor of Men’s Health magazine (UK), who had this to say:
“All men these days subscribe to the idea of the ‘New man’ … but I think men are struggling to reconcile that with an older, shall we say, idea of masculinity, which is still hard-wired – certainly into a certain generation – 30 to 50 year-olds.”
What we are seeing here is a closeted reference to the traditional ideological feminist theory of ‘toxic’ or ‘hegemonic’ masculinity. The part of the theory he’s speaking about basically states that male society forces men to adopt stereotypically ‘macho’ traits that train men to be emotionally ‘shut down’ stoics who take refuge in negative behaviour. The theory itself is far more complicated than this, has very many problems, and is full of built-in assumptions – but we will save most of those for a later article. The part we are most interested in here is the reference to the idea that men commit suicide because they are “hard-wired” to fulfil traditional male roles at any cost, which continues with:
“And so I think through our survey we learnt that men still define themselves by their career: it gives them a sense of self-esteem; I think people, uh, men, of a certain age think very much that they should be the breadwinner and supporting the family.”
“And they’re struggling [in] trying to reconcile those different ideas, resulting in this kind of isolation and panic and withdrawal.”
Lack of self esteem and failure to fulfil male roles are minor yet valid points to raise – but the argument here totally misses out on the big picture and it dangerously implies the situation is purely the man’s fault. What this section of the show is essentially selling us is not that men are suffering because they are in crisis, or because the world expects men to ‘do their duty’ as a human utility. No, the actual stumbling block put forward is that masculinity itself is to blame for men committing suicide – by getting in the way of them seeking help. This claim seems to be backed up by the fact that 69% of men in the cited Men’s Health study said they would not seek help from a professional. The host does a good job of asking if men might not know where to go for help, but wonders too if men might feel like getting help is ‘self indulgent’ or a sign they are ‘weak’.
But what this section really misses is a very important question: “Would therapy help these men, or do they need more practical solutions as well?”. Talking therapy is great if you are suffering from depression or mental anxiety – but as we will see, mental problems might often be just symptoms of the main issue:
How Wrecked Lives And Broken Minds Lead To Suicide
Next in the documentary it is also mentioned that there is a causal link between crisis and suicide – with financial worries brought on by unemployment leading to relationship problems, and then eventual breakdown, which in turn is likely to result in homelessness. Added to all this, if bereavement and grief are present, the chances of suicidal ideation sky-rocket. This is a key factor in understanding that real forces behind suicide tend to be problems that men are legally stuck with.
Examples of this in the documentary include broken marriages and homelessness – but completely missing are the issues of the man being raped, a victim of domestic violence, or paternity pay, or an ex keeping him from his children. However, immediately after this scene, the glimmer of promise returns when Van Tulleken notes that in the UK, the rate of make suicide is 35% higher in the North East – where there are high levels of unemployment and poverty – than in London. This is a key factor in understanding one of the real causes of suicide – total hopelessness in the face of the unbearable.
At this point, they interview a man from the North-East, Tony, whose best mate Danny committed suicide not long after losing his job. Tony, not long after, then loses his own job, goes bankrupt, becomes homeless and therefore loses access to his six-month old daughter. With all that going on, we learn that Tony tried (unsuccessfully) to hang himself. At the end of the programme we also learn that yet another of Tony’s close friends took his life after the programme had finished filming.
Finally, at this point, I was thinking that they would get to the nub of the issue and focus on the fact that what is killing men is not some fantastical notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ but what’s actually happening to them in their lives. They seemed to be trying for this, but then something really weird happened – something that was so weird that I would ask anyone else in the UK to take a look at it because it seems hugely suspicious. (go to 21:56 on the clock).
Van Tulleken travels to see Shirley Smith, a woman who lost her 19 year-old son to suicide, of a charity called If U Care, Share. In her office, Smith keeps a map of the area (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne region) into which she sticks pins that show where suicides take place:
This chart only represents referrals to their service – which may explain the single huge cluster of pink pins.
As she’s saying this, the camera has cuts to the small town of Consett – which is covered in a thick cluster of 15 pink pins, in between which are dotted just 6 blue pins. A further 10 colourless pins are visible – but these are not explained. They could be anything, though it’s possible they are also for men.
Not only is it startling to see the pink pins outnumber the blue by 3 to 1 (i.e. the total reverse of the rate at which men commit suicide compared to women), but when the camera pulls away to show another part of the map, around Durham, it shows two tight clusters of 15 pins – all blue – and another of 12 or 13 pins – again all blue. When later the camera pulls away to show the map of the whole region the charity covers, we see a board of overwhelmingly blue pins except for – weirdly – the small town of Consett. It is extremely worrying that – on a board covered in blue pins – it is the town covered in pink pins that the camera focuses on first. In fact, it seems almost emblematic of the way female problems are focused on by our society. The next section muddies the message even further. First, Van Tulleken gasps in shock:
“What I guess is very depressing and very shocking is that you have two huge bags of pins down there”
The camera then cuts to a close up of Smith’s open hand, in which are clearly visible a single blue pin and three pink ones – which again, is the inverse of the actual ratio of male to female suicides. Of course, a smart viewer might say that she’s holding pink ones in her hand because all the blue ones are in the board already – but that hardly addresses the visual implications. It is at this point that our brief resurgence hope dies away altogether as, in the next scene, we see Van Tulleken driving to Scotland as he asks:
“But there’s one thing I’m still no clearer on – why is it that three times more men than women go on to die in this way when far more women than men attempt suicide?”
The answer to that is given by Professor Rory O’Connor, who basically points out that men are far more likely to choose more lethal methods of ending their own lives and are therefore more likely to die in this way. Almost apologising for having an opinion that he knows may not be totally acceptable to ideologues, O’Connor then says the last really noteworthy thing in the whole programme:
“Men – in general – and this is a generalisation! I appreciate that! – they invest a lot of their emotional support in their partner. Now if their partner leaves them, or for whatever reason the relationship breaks down, that man is potentially isolated and more likely to be emotionally isolated because men don’t tend to have the broader network of emotional support that women have.”
This occurs at literally the half-way mark of the programme and it’s from this point on that the ostensible subject of the programme “Stopping Male Suicide” is abandoned completely. From this point, right through to the end, there is no further mention of men in particular committing suicide, only on various generic strategies for suicide prevention and how likely to be effective they are. Now I have no problem with advertising strategies that everyone can use – women do commit suicide and I know of four such women of my own (not always very close) acquaintance who have done this.
But it is deeply insensitive, as well as counter-productive, to call this programme Stopping Male Suicide but then have that same programme heavily imply that this is just as much (if not more of a problem) for women at the halfway point, and then thereafter forget altogether that the programme was called Stopping Male Suicide?
Why call it that in the first place if they were more interested in the – admittedly valuable – topic of suicide prevention for all cases?
I’m willing to be proved wrong, but to my knowledge at least BBC programmes over the last decade or so focussed on domestic violence and sexual assault have focussed exclusively on women victims/survivors and male perpetrators/abusers and where no attempt has been made to suggest that these crimes do not exclusively afflict women. We commend Horizon’s makers for keeping its case-studies focused on male victims of suicide and attempted suicide and feel they did a good job here – but, again, where is the male-specific suicide advice? It may well be that none exists, but not mentioning this makes us wonder if the original point of the programme was just to investigate why anyone might take their own life in very general terms. But if that is not the case, they really needed that focus at the end on specifically preventing male suicide in order to call it Stopping Male Suicide.
This is especially true because the most promising aspects of the programme – financial problems, loss of status and livelihood, employment, homelessness, lack of access to their children, self-esteem, etc. – were infuriatingly hinted at but not developed. In that sense, what it didn’t have to say was overall more striking than what it did.
TL;DR Basically, a BBC programme called Stopping Male Suicide that I would say is worth watching but is a missed opportunity – it hinted at some important causes of male suicide but then seemed to pass over these in silence and move away from discussing issues of male suicide altogether and rather focus on suicidal risk on the part of anyone – a really laudable aim in itself, but then why call it Stopping Male Suicide?
How do we know that women attempt suicide more often than men? If I ever attempted suicide and didn’t manage to do it, I’d never tell a soul.
We actually don’t know at all – despite how often people give out that figure. There’s actually no official statistic on attempted suicides because it’s impossible to count – as you say.
I’s hazard a guess that this is simply a box ticking exercise in tackling an unfashionable topic for a politically incorrect identity that the majority of producers and controllers at the BBC simply do not care about or look at with jealous disdain because something might need to be done to help them, and specifically did not allow mention of anything that could be seen as taboo from a feminist perspective. Not even men’s lives trumps overcoming feminist dogma.