The Office for National Statistics put the male suicide rate at 17.6 per 100,000 in 2024, with men accounting for roughly three suicides in four. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for any British man under 50. Those are the stark figures. We hear all about knife crime, gang culture, drug-related deaths and murder, and yet the most alarming statistic is the suicide rate among men under 50.
Why are so many men killing themselves? And what on earth would we be doing about it if it were women dying at three or four times the male rate?
Writing this, I notice I’m numb. Why am I not outraged, demanding answers, looking into what can be done to bring the number down? Is it because I view suicide as a kind of failure, and failure makes me uncomfortable? Or is it because I’ve been conditioned to believe that men should be strong, that they should provide and protect, and that if they check out they have failed to live up to my idea of how men ought to be? I don’t think 50 years of being told men are patriarchal oppressors, and that our gender is ‘toxic’, is helping either.
Men carry the burden of performance. We are heavily invested in raising families, protecting those families and providing for them, even in these times of so-called gender equality. Most notably, it is men in their late forties who are most likely to take their own lives, according to the ONS. This is the age group most associated with divorce, relationship breakdown and job loss. Men are particularly vulnerable when there are court battles or conflicts over access to their children. The result is depression, self-hatred, a sense of failure and despair.
Younger men are not far behind. The pattern is consistent across age groups: boys and men killing themselves at three to four times the rate of women. It is not hard to conclude from these numbers that society cares rather less about the wellbeing of men and boys than it lets on. When it comes to the methods, women tend toward pills and slipping away. Men, more often, choose methods that leave no chance of being talked back from the edge.
Why are men doing this? In the last 50 years feminism has pushed harder and harder on its message that women are the victims of male oppression, and with it has come the message that men are bad, cold, dangerous and not to be trusted. The 2021 Census marked the first time in our history that fewer than half of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian, and with the quiet retreat of that faith went the framework that gave the average man his place in the world. Imagine growing up with the message that your very God-given nature is toxic and needs to be corrected in a culture that no longer believes in the God who gave it to you. The inclination is to want to fit in, and if that means throwing your own nature overboard, so be it.
Too many men have walked into this trap blindly, not knowing the true consequences of trying to be acceptable on terms that require them to disappear. Masculinity at its core is the energy that protects and provides in any thriving society. When it’s attacked and men agree with their attackers, the outcome is chaos.
Because men have largely agreed with the narrative that our nature needs correcting, we now have nearly three generations of confused, medicated and quietly angry males. From the Gillette advert in 2019 lecturing men on toxic masculinity to a Violence Against Women and Girls strategy that speaks of “men and boys” wreaking havoc, the institutions that shape modern life have reached the same conclusion: strong men are the problem. It is a message men have absorbed without resistance, and the male suicide rate are what that absorption looks like in practice.
It’s worth remembering what the word patriarchy actually means. As Stephen Jenkinson points out, it comes from patros (father) and arche (foundation): literally, the fathering of a culture. You cannot have a matriarchy without a patriarchy first. One creates the conditions for the other. Most people do not understand this and have bought into the idea that one is bad for society and the other is the answer. What the last 50 years have shown is not that the fathering of a culture is oppressive. It’s that a culture which dispenses with the fathering does not become free. It becomes lost.
That is the work we do at Integral Man. We invite men to stop apologising for their nature and to recognise they’ve been lied to. A weekend in the company of other men. Phones off, conversation honest, the hill in front of you. Prayer, silence, story, and the slow work of remembering who you were before the culture told you who to be. The next weekend runs in West Sussex this September.
Mark Nightingale co-runs Integral Man, which is a UK Community Interest Company. Details, dates and bursary information can be found at integralman.org.
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The England and Wales 2024 suicide figures are best presented in a chart to show age distribution:
Note the definition used to describe these deaths. Very strange is that there was one female and one male in the under 1 age group, one female in the 1-4 and one female in the 5-9 age group – I’ve no idea how these could be so defined. Tragically, in the 10-14 age group there were 6 male and 19 female deaths in this category.
And note that when suicide occurs, it often causes a lot of disruption for those that are affected by the action of the person involved, such as an occasion about 30 years ago when a man jumped in front of the train I was a passenger on. It happened at Cholsey on the Down Main, and we would have been running at about 125 mph there. It led to an emergency stop between there and Didcot. After an hour or so, a replacement crew took it forward to Swindon, where it terminated with everyone being required to leave from the rear two or three cars only – too much unwanted junk on the outside of the rest; not nice.
Yes, I can imagine it’s incredibly inconvenient for others when someone is so selfish as to end their life in that way. Do they not understand that most people want to relax with a coffee and a baked good before they start work at 9am?
I think he means traumatised.
It is very distressing for the driver of the train or car or tube train to see the person and to be able to do nothing about it.
I feel the word ‘patriarchy’ is a rather outdated and obsolete word because it’s basically non-existent in the West nowadays due to its irrelevance in society and the laws we have in place. For more on this topic, from a historical aspect to the present day, this is a well-written, comprehensive essay;
”The word “patriarchy” seems to be everywhere. In newspapers, online magazines, talk shows, or social media, as soon as the issue of gender relations or rights is raised, so is the spectre of “the patriarchy.” Battles rage over what it means, whether it exists now, and whether it ever did exist. My area of research focuses on the ways in which English women negotiated patriarchy using religion in the late medieval and early modern period, so I am fairly confident it did.
A historical understanding of patriarchy rejects both the claim that it was a straightforward form of male domination and the claim that it is a feminist fabrication and never really existed. Arguments that patriarchy exists in the UK, US, or much of the Western world today are largely dependent on reinventions of the concept that I argue would be better dispensed with. Instead, they should be replaced with more rigorous… Read more »
In real life I don’t think anyone has ever used the word “patriarchy” in conversation with me, or the phrase “toxic masculinity”. I have met and spoken to a reasonable cross section of people in my 60 years. I can’t help thinking that extreme opinions at both ends of this spectrum are much rarer in the population than we get the impression of from the internet or our political leaders. I can’t help thinking that divisions are being sown deliberately by grifters and manipulators.
Yes there is a debate to be had in my view about the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” ways of looking at the world, and for sure people I have met and know have different views on that, but I am not sure the extremes of this debate online and the things imposed in the name of supposed “toxic” this or that are at all helpful. For my part I feel that we’ve gone a bit too far towards the “feminine” side but “feminine” and “women” are not the same thing, just as “masculine” and “men” are not the same.
Yes, 100% agree. I think the people that bother raking up this particular defunct term are those with an axe to grind and a bee in their bonnet. Typically those nutty feminists protesting with their placards: ”Smash the patriarchy!”, and such, usually with their knockers hanging out and the words daubed on their chests. Or maybe that’s just the French ladies…
There are some people who seem inordinately fixated on contributing to and facilitating a male/female divide, as we’ve witnessed with comments on here. I think such individuals, with their preoccupation with grievance and their overt hostility towards the female sex, do not represent the vast majority of men’s attitudes towards women just like the nutjob, man-hating feminists do not represent the vast majority of how women view men. This is where the general ”toxicity” manifests: the animosity directed toward either sex. It’s certainly not sex-specific.
Like you, I don’t hear this sort of conversation amongst my social circle, colleagues etc. My female friends will grumble about individuals of both sexes, as is natural when you get together. Most normal, well-balanced people believe that respect is reciprocal and people should be treated as individuals, regardless of characteristics, and don’t sit… Read more »
But poison IS the feminine choice.
Are the thousands of young men who cross the English Channel in dinghies invited to demonise themselves as misogynists and toxic? Are they invited to think of maleness as merely an appendage?
It really is up to men to do something about this vile slur. No woman I know would put up with the generalisation “toxic femininity”.
I think most people ignore it as part of the incessant drumbeat of gaslighting that is now part of our society and culture.
Just one of a long litany of accusations:
We’re racist, misogynist, homophonic, transphobic, we destroy the planet, overpopulate, are selfish and don’t give the state enough money, we are colonisers, unwelcoming to migrants etc, etc…
Its important not to lose sight of the fact that male physical prowess, accounts for the outcome that male attempts at suicide are ‘successful’ at a much higher rate than female attempts. The disccrepancy in the gender balance of suicides is largely down to this.
That’s complete conjecture. And, I believe, totally wrong. Physical ‘prowess’ has absolutely nothing to do with tying a noose, taking an overdose, slitting your wrists, jumping off a cliff, or any other way of taking your own life that I can think of. There’s no prerequisite that I’m aware of that states you must bench 3 sets of 100kg before attempting suicide.
My daughter is a mental health nurse and she says that a contributing factor to the high male suicide rate is that men choose methods which are instant. Women take overdoses so are often found and saved.
Doesn’t mean that calling masculinity toxic isn’t wrong by the way, just this is another factor to take into account on the numbers.
That I can believe, but that’s absolutely nothing to do with ‘physical prowess’. What that indicates is that men want to die and women actually do not – that they are hoping to be saved. That explains the disparity between the sexes far better.
Did I say it was physical prowess?
Jumping off a cliff (your example) doesn’t demand physical prowess. It’s just a difference between the male and female mind. And I think it’s a bit of an assumption that women want to be found.
Incidentally an overdose is an absolutely horrible way to go. What that stuff does to you, people can suffer for days.
I suspect a proportion of female attempts are not intended to succeed; they are a cry for help or (and I hate saying this) emotional manipulation.
It’s a lot easier to organise both with a fistful of pills, than it is with a rope or jumping in front of an HGV.
Before I get accused of being heartless, my mother committed suicide. 3 attempts; two “unsuccessful.” The first two were cries for help; by the third she had given up.
And more recently a friend took a handful of pills but beforehand, sent a message to her daughter (who had been refusing to talk to her) and was therefore found “in time.”