Masculinity Audit Into Causes Of Suicide Reveals Brothers Suffer Depression In A Way Even Doctors Could Miss

Date: Tuesday 11 Jul 2017

New report: Men are three times more likely than women to take their own lives.

“Society thinks men are doing pretty well ok compared to women. Actually, this shows that when men talk about depression on their own terms, quite a large proportion are not doing so well.”

The unequal impacts of mental health issues on men in the UK are revealed today in a landmark report into the causes of male suicide.

The research carried out by the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) and The Huffington Post UK, and released as part of the Building Modern Men campaign, highlights how men struggle differently to women in life and specifically to mental health problems.

Men lack the “language” to talk about their mental health

CALM’s latest Masculinity Audit reveals that men are not only less likely than women to open up to friends about being depressed, they’re also more likely to exhibit risk-taking behaviour and feel more frustrated at life’s challenges, like losing a job.

Launched ahead of International Men’s Day, the audit details how barely half of men who admitted to feeling “very depressed” had told anyone about it, compared with 67% of women who did, bringing to light a parallel gender difference in how men and women respond to life’s low points.

The findings coincide with new UK-wide statistics, compiled by CALM and HuffPost UK, that reveal suicide remains the single biggest killer of British males under the age of 45.

The data shows that over 4,500 men kill themselves every year in Britain, with men three times more likely than women to take their own lives.

Experts believe the audit highlights how men lack the “language” to talk about their mental health, meaning doctors may be failing to spot key danger signs.

''The whole system is orientated towards treating women rather than men.''

Psychotherapist Damien Ridge, a professor of health studies at the University of Westminster, told HuffPost UK: “[Society] thinks men are doing pretty well ok compared to women. Actually, this shows that when men talk about depression on their own terms, quite a large proportion are not doing so well.”

The fact that a majority of gay men (61%) reported having felt very depressed is striking for Prof Ridge: “That’s most gay men. We don’t think of mental health that way. We think of mental health as being in a minority. What this is saying is, actually, most of us, from time to time, have mental health problems.”

Men and women talk about problems differently

The figures show half of all male respondents had felt very depressed, but among men aged 25 to 34, the figure rises to two thirds, with the main reasons listed as mental health, financial problems and relationship breakdowns.

And it finds that, while men were less likely to have been diagnosed with common mental health disorders than women, the gap was closer when they were asked whether they had felt “very depressed”.

Despite a GP being the person men were most likely to speak to, Prof Ridge added he feared professionals were unable “to pick up or spot the coded ways that men talk about their distress”.

“It’s well-known that men do things like self-medicate or become angry or become somebody else’s problem when they’re distressed,” he says.

“Men let it build up then they lash out at themselves and other people. There’s even an idea that there’s ‘a male kind of depression’.”

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