TW: Suicide, suicidal thoughts, depression.
According to the 2020 annual suicide data of Samaritans for England: the overall suicide rate was 10 per 100,000 people. Evaluating this data by gender, 15.3 of 100,000 men committed suicide compared to 4.9 of 100,000 women; men committing suicide 3.12 times more relative to women. Additionally, males aged 45-49 continued to have the highest suicide rate with 23.8 per 100,000 men. It is evident that disproportionately more men are lost to suicide each year. This begs the question: why?
This question is heavily debated in psychology and sociology. Thus multiple psychosocial risk factors have been identified and analysed in relation to the gender discrepancies in suicide rates. However, in this blog, I would like to focus on two factors that disproportionately impact men: being less likely to seek help for well-being difficulties and expressing depression differently.
Men are less likely to seek help for any wellbeing difficulty, even when the content of their distress involves suicidal thoughts. Unfortunately, this lack of help-seeking behaviour extends beyond the stigma around professional help as men self-admittedly avoid seeking help from their friends as well. Gender role socialisation immensely contributes to developing this reluctance for seeking help. Adhering to traditional masculine norms of: stoicism, independence, toughness, competition, and avoidance of feminine traits (most significantly emotions) affects the acknowledgment, presentation and treatment of well-being distress. Consequently, as men are socialized to protect their socially promoted dominant male traits they avoid reaching out for help and suffer in silence.
Some men, without conscious effort, transform vulnerable emotional states into socially accepted and preferred displays of irritability and anger. Hence, depression symptoms for men are different to women as “male depression” exists within masculine norms as opposed to feminine norms. Resultantly, men are less likely to label feelings of distress as actual problems considering these displays of emotion are associated with masculinity and the majority of depression treatment has been developed for women.
Society moulds men into masculinity: men are socialized through their interactions with the people in their lives such as parents, friends, teachers and their wider consumption of social media to adhere to masculinity. Effectively, men are socialized to ignore ques of emotional distress, refuse help in any capacity and taught to accumulate rage. Dominant masculinity exists in the expense of male mental health and survival. A single man should not be responsible for overcoming these agents of silence when the culprit is an entire society surrounding him. With greater recognition of this issue we should all work together to redefine masculinity and “male depression” so as to generate spaces in which men do not feel emasculated to break the silence.
---- Narkiz Aydogan, Treasurer
Sources
https://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/ddc/c8cxpa/further/Dissertation_examples/Poynton-Smith_15.pdf - Poynton-Smith, Emma. “Why Is the Suicide Rate Higher in Men than in Women?” The University of Nottingham, The University of Nottingham, pp. 1–18.
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8 - Freeman, A., Mergl, R., Kohls, E. et al. A cross-national study on gender differences in suicide intent. BMC Psychiatry 17, 234 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3038836/ - Wide, Jennifer et al. “Effect of gender socialization on the presentation of depression among men: A pilot study.” Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien vol. 57,2 (2011): e74-8.
·https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/research-policy/suicide-facts-and-figures/latest-suicide-data/ - “Suicide Facts and Figures.” Samaritans, https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/research-policy/suicide-facts-and-figures/.
