Suicidal Men Don’t Need More Feminism

Seven men die by suicide in Australia every day – more than 2,500 a year. In May 2026, the peak body for men’s health endorsed a plan to address this by teaching boys about gender equity.

There is a moment in any institutional capture when the pretence falls away. For decades, men’s health advocates expressing concern about the neglect of male suicide have been totally ignored. But in May 2026 the politeness ended — replaced by something more sinister. In a coordinated move involving Government Ministers, federally funded suicide bodies and the domestic violence industry, the sector delivered a blunt message to anyone still fighting for the men doing the dying: get on board or get out of the way.

The acting head of the Australian Men’s Health Forum — the peak men’s health body — has taken the extraordinary step of urging his member organisations to “organise across differences” behind a single shared agenda — a distinctly feminist agenda, as was made brutally clear in an open letter circulated alongside his email.

That letter was written by Ben Vasiliou, CEO of The Man Cave — the smiling front man of a new cabal taking control of male suicide prevention. The Man Cave has spent 12 years teaching 100,000 teenage boys to express their feelings and apologise for their masculinity. Its Healthy MaTE schools programme attracts $4.4 million in government funding — money administered not through any men’s health budget but through the National Plan to End Violence Against Women. The Man Cave is, in other words, a delivery vehicle for feminist ideology — using suicide prevention as its public justification and domestic violence funding as its cash source, while its actual business is remaking the minds of teenage boys. There is no credible evidence it has prevented a single suicide.

Look at the manifesto Vasiliou now wants the entire men’s health sector to embrace. Its first principle is the safety of women, with the goal defined as producing men “who do no harm”. It insists that “promoting healthy expressions of masculinity goes hand-in-hand with advancing gender equity” — explicitly framing male suicide as a product of gender norms. Not family court. Not loss of children. The situational drivers that the evidence consistently identifies as among the primary causes of male suicide do not get a mention.

As a reward for his loyalty, Vasiliou’s Healthy MaTE schools programme received a bonus $861,000. Meanwhile the programmes genuinely trying to help suicidal men navigate situational crisis received nothing in the recent budget. Given the ideologues now controlling levers of men’s health funding, that is unlikely to change.

The Australian Men’s Health Forum, like all men’s organisations receiving government funding, has long been terrified of biting the hand that feeds it. But its previous CEO, Glen Poole, did manage to publish one inconvenient truth, namely a 2021 analysis showing four in five clients of government-funded suicide services are women. Hardly news the government wanted the public to know.

There’s no question that most of the suicide prevention funding is still going to women. This is locked in — for one utterly amazing reason.

What comes next reads like satire. It isn’t.

Australia’s suicide prevention policy is now guided by a principle called ‘lived experience’. The idea is straightforward: people who have personally survived a suicidal crisis are best placed to decide how to prevent suicide. Peer workers, advisory committees, grant panels, peak bodies — all must now include people with this lived experience. It sounds reasonable. It is, in practice, a mechanism for ensuring men’s suicide prevention policies remain strictly in female hands.

The logic is simple and devastating. Women attempt suicide more than men. Men die from suicide attempts more than women. The people with the most direct lived experience of the crisis — the men who complete suicide — are unavailable for comment. The selection mechanism for who gets a seat at the policy table is survival, and survival is gendered. The result is a female-dominated workforce making decisions about a male-dominated catastrophe.

These women making policy are not villains. But their lived experience is not the lived experience of a middle-aged man who has just lost his children in the family court, lost his house, lost his income, and is sleeping in his car. Programmes shaped by female survivors look like what we have now: talking about feelings, reducing stigma, building emotional connection. Programmes shaped by his experience would look entirely different — emergency housing, legal advocacy, financial crisis intervention. Those programmes don’t exist, because the people who would demand them aren’t in the room.

The largest direct service programme is the Way Back Support Service, receiving over $150 million. Way Back supports suicide attempt survivors. 60% of its clients are women. Three quarters of suicide deaths are men. Nobody in the policy system finds this worth remarking on.

And how did this system design itself? The health department asked the sector what was needed. The sector — peer workers, lived experience advocates, healthy masculinity evangelists — answered. Naturally they recommended more lived experience, more healthy masculinities, more of everything that had already failed to move the dial. Australia’s suicide policies are failing. From 2000 to 2021 Australia’s suicide rate fell by just 1%, while the global average declined by 36%.

Yet the people running the system have decided this means more of the same is needed — and with the feminist capture of May 2026 now complete, the healthy masculinities agenda is no longer lurking in the background. It is front and centre.

That was on display last week when relevant bureaucrats were grilled in Parliament by Senator Tyron Whitten. Their glib, deceptive answers to Whitten’s straightforward questions spoke volumes about why our Australia’s suicide policies are failing.

What does this feminist capture mean for the organisations currently scrambling for funding to help suicidal men? Most of them are already in the wrong business — encouraging men to seek help, which in practice means the poor bloke ends up suffering through a female psych exploring his feelings. Helpful, perhaps. But not for the man whose problem is he hasn’t seen his kids in six months. Or has been thrown out of his house and has nowhere to live.

The men dying by suicide in Australia are not dying because they haven’t learned to cry. They are mainly dying because they’ve lost their children, their homes, their reason to keep going — and the system built to save them is too busy advancing gender equity to notice. Seven men today. Seven tomorrow. The feminist capture of suicide prevention is not an abstraction. It is a body count.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.