Eight people kill themselves every day in Australia, six of them men, and the latest figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday revealed that male suicides have increased by 41% in the past decade, from 1,624 deaths a year in 2006 to 2,292 suicides in 2015.

Male suicide costs the economy an estimated $13.75bn a year. If we closed the gender suicide gap and reduced the male level to the same level as females, we could save the lives of more than 1,500 Australian men a year and save the economy an annual $9.3bn.



With stakes this high, why are we consistently failing to stop men killing themselves?

The American suicidologist David Lester says all the main strategies used to prevent suicide are more effective at helping suicidal women. With two women a day dying by suicide, it’s vital we continue to develop our capacity to prevent female suicide, but when three-quarters of Australians who kill themselves are men, we can and must do more to stop male suicide.

Doing more doesn’t necessarily mean spending more. As Labor senator Penny Wong said in June, existing funding and resources are failing to reach men. Earlier this year, for example, the Black Dog Institute launched Lifespan, a $14.7m suicide prevention project which aims to reduce suicide by 21% with a range of strategies such as training GPs. Yet we all know that men make fewer GP visits on average and are less likely to benefit from such approaches. Even the most sophisticated suicide prevention initiatives, it seems, are failing to consider the gendered impact of their strategies.

It’s not that the suicide prevention sector is unwilling to think about gender. Lifeline’s chief executive, Pete Shmigel, has spoken passionately about the need to tackle female suicide by understanding “what’s driving despair and what builds resilience so women are empowered in their emotional lives, as well as their political, social and economic lives”. Yet when it comes to talking about male suicide, he becomes oddly monosyllabic, saying things like: “We have to do a better job, us blokes, of talking about our stuff.”

When it comes to suicide and gender, we’re great at pointing the finger at “blokes” for not talking, but don’t reflect on the irony that while many of us can talk freely and fluently about women’s issues, even smart, powerful men like Shmigel appear to find talking about men’s issues a bit awkward and uncomfortable.

So what could we do differently? When writing the book You Can Stop Male Suicide, I concluded that there are three simple, but by no means easy, strategies that can help us stop male suicide.

First, we need to get better at tackling the social issues that men and boys face, rather than falling back on tired, ineffective stereotypes of stubborn, stoical blokes who refuse to talk or get help.

Male suicide is a solution-based behaviour that some men turn to when dealing with problems they can neither fix, nor cope with. It is the product of a whole host of men’s issues we are collectively failing to solve, leaving too many distressed men viewing suicide as the best possible solution to the problems they face.

There are a number of social issues that affect men more profoundly in terms of suicide risk, including unemployment, relationship issues, being separated from their kids, being a victim of violence or abuse, alcohol and substance abuse, long-term illness, homelessness, social isolation and mental health disorders.

We also know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and males who identify as gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex are at increased risk of suicide. Our failure to tackle men’s issues in general, or consider how gender intersects with factors such as culture and sexuality, is hindering our efforts to prevent male suicide.

Second, we need to get better at helping men. In Queensland, for example, the health department has acknowledged that around one in four men who suicide, die within a week of receiving help from the health service. We need to stop saying “Why are men so useless at getting help?” and ask ourselves “Why are we so useless at helping men?”

Finally, we need to shift the balance of suicide prevention work from generic approaches that are better at helping women and girls, to gendered approaches that are better at helping everyone, men and boys included.

Such a task requires progressive thinkers to look beyond the binary narrative of gender issues that tells us that “women HAVE problems and men ARE problems”.

Every time we put the blame for male suicide on men not talking or getting help, we reinforce unhelpful, macho beliefs that men should be strong, powerful and self-reliant.

A more evolved view of masculinity requires us to ask ourselves how we get better at helping men, how we get better at listening to men and how we get better at tackling the social issues that men and boys face, not least of which is the fact that suicide kills more than 2,000 Australian men a year.

• Man Up, a new series about male suicide in Australia, airs on the ABC on Tuesdays at 8.30pm from 11 October

•Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467.

