At the start of the inquest into the death of his daughter Anna this week, Michael Mansfield announced the launch of a new forum, SOS – Silence on Suicide – aiming to reduce the stigma of suicide and suicidal feelings. Mansfield’s initiative deserves wholehearted support. Because more than 50 years after it was taken off the statute books as a crime, suicide is still a matter for shame – as is depression itself.

I know it, because I feel it. Every time I write about suicide or depression – and since my mother killed herself after witnessing a bout of my own depression in 1988, I experience a deep reluctance to put words to paper. I am not ashamed of my mother killing herself, although 25 years on I still find the words difficult to write.

But as for my own experiences, the instinct I have to overcome is to be embarrassed and hush it up. I want to be “normal”. I want to forget I am vulnerable to that damning epithet “mental illness” (and it is a vulnerability, not a permanent condition – most of the time, when they are well, “depressives” are perfectly cheerful, well-rounded human beings).

I felt shame when I wrote a few weeks ago in these pages about recently being tumbled into a year-long depression and now I feel the shame again, but I will go ahead and write anyway because I feel I have to, until the stigma has been defeated. That day is still a long way off.

I had dinner once with a famous agony aunt who laughed gleefully about all the meds she took for depression. She was utterly uninhibited about it, and I admired her greatly. She urged me not to be ashamed of my disability – for that is what it is – and she was right. But it isn’t easy.

Childbirth and the oppression women have suffered have bonded them in a way that most men have denied themselves

The source of my feelings is mainly, I think, societal. To have troubles in the mind is considered to be in a different category to troubles in the body. It is to be on the spectrum of “crazy” or “weak”. Weakness seems more allowable for women since men have in the past constructed a (ridiculous) stereotype of women being fragile creatures. Nevertheless, such negative stereotyping can, ironically, have fringe benefits, just as childbirth and the oppression women have historically suffered have bonded them in a way that most men have denied themselves. “The sisterhood” is not an empty expression.

I don’t like the fact that my children are required to understand me as someone who is vulnerable. My 22-year-old daughter, the eldest of four, still avoids reading my memoir of my depression and my mother’s death because she doesn’t want to think of me in that way. I understand her response. But would she feel the same if I had suffered paraplegia, or blindness?

Part of this stigma is thus attached to my being a man – because, in fact, Anna Mansfield’s death runs counter to the overall trend for suicide. Men’s suicide levels have been rising for years. Running above 6,000 a year, they stand an astonishing 4,000 higher than women’s levels, which are dropping.

Paradoxically, one in four women will seek treatment for depression in a year, compared with one in 10 men. But this does not necessarily mean that women are more, or more often, depressed then men – rather that women are dealing with the problem far more successfully.

There are many reasons for this. It is historically hard for a man to admit such “weakness” to himself – in my 20s I spent four years in the grip of a serious depression without visiting a doctor, believing that psychiatric treatment was for weirdos and losers. As a result I was pushed on to a very dangerous path that, thankfully, I never followed through and have never revisited.

Quite apart from my typical male reluctance to “seek help”, there were other factors in play. Men not only shun being thought of as weak, they tend to be socially isolated compared to women.

Intimate conversations between men may be had at the pub occasionally, but the real support, the love, the crying on one another’s shoulder, the support of a large informal network that many women enjoy, is largely absent. We are frightened of showing our weakness not only to each other, but to our children and our wives – many of whom still count “strength” as a prime virtue among their husbands and who may not want the burden of “another child to look after”.

Suicide will never be abolished – apart from anything else, you don’t have to be clinically depressed to take your own life – but I have little doubt that the shocking statistics could be ameliorated if depression continued its journey out of the closet of fear and condemnation (including self-condemnation) and into the light of sympathy and understanding. SOS is thus a cry for help long overdue.

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here