If as many women killed themselves as men, we'd never hear the end of it

Interesting commentary, not saying I agree with it all but...

Just before Christmas, charities concerned with suicide circulated figures showing that almost four times as many men as women now kill themselves. This prompted me again to wonder why do men have so little sympathy or fellow feeling for men? Why do we care so little about each other?

As ever, discussion of those suicide figures was mediated by women. All of the predictable commentators wheeled out yet again the unchanging, mouldy narrative of gender stereotypes which we have been hearing for 40 years. What they always say is that suicidal men turn their aggression on themselves because they are useless at talking about their problems - mute primitives, as we are - and need help to open up their sensitive side.

Jane Powell, Director of Calm, responded to the December figures by saying: “Men can feel less able to talk about their problems.” In the past, that same authority has written “For a man to ask for help is seen as failure, because by convention men are supposed to be in control at all times”. Even the Samaritans locate “emotional illiteracy” and “masculinity” among the reasons for the greater numbers of male suicide.

(You can’t help but wonder how fully those diagnoses account for the suicides of – for example - Van Gogh, Mayakovsky, Richard Brautigan, Jerzy Kozinski, R.B. Kitaj, Mark Rothko and Kurt Cobain? Did those dumb brutes do away with themselves because they couldn’t find the words to express their thoughts or compose the art to convey their feelings?)

In other words, brothers, the fault cannot be externally - with our stars or our times - but must be with ourselves that so many of us are sick to death. According to the standard authorities, there is something in the very nature of masculinity that causes men to kill themselves.

No man appeared in the national media to ask if this savage disparity between men and women might raise the question whether many more men than women are placed in circumstances where it seems reasonable to feel that life isn't worth living.

Educational disadvantage, debt, unemployment, mental illness, imprisonment, problems with drink and drugs, family breakdown and separation from children through the family law system - all of these conditions which, in fact, affect men far more numerously and adversely than women might be considered to have a bearing on the suicide figures rather than the Agony Aunt's clucking observation that the chaps aren't very clever at expressing their innermost feelings.

Why don't men speak up for men on this question? Why are they so mute, passive, unmoved? Why do they feel no personal connection or brotherly solidarity with those unfortunate men? If three to four times as many women as men killed themselves, we would be hearing about it every day. Every feminist columnist and commentator would be raging about this incontestable proof that women suffer unbearable disadvantage in a society organised by horrible men for their own benefit.

Nick Clegg would launch a national campaign. Ed Miliband would wring his hands and turn to Harriet Harman to put the words in his mouth. Woman's Hour would devote a week of programmes to the cause.

What do we hear from men when the subject in question is men? Not a peep.

Perhaps this is, indeed, conclusive proof that men aren't very good at expressing their feelings; but I take it more as evidence that men don’t think of themselves as members of a social collectivity called "men" in which they share mutual interests. Women have been parading a sororal solidarity with all women for the last 50 years which now seems to entitle all women to speak on behalf of all women at any moment because they all, supposedly, share the same interests and outlook. Most men don't begin to see other men in that light at all.

They are likely to care about their sons and grandsons. They probably care about their fathers, their brothers and their cousins. They often care a lot about their friends, their colleagues and their team-mates. But men, as a whole, couldn’t give a stuff about the notional idea of men as whole.

Men are obviously superbly adept at forging and belonging to tribal fraternities - whether it's the hunting party, the platoon, the sports team, the freshman year or the place of work. When they subjugate their individual identities in tactical organisations, such as an army or a football gang, they can make the world shake in their unity. But it would no more occur to most men to raise their voices on behalf of men who commit suicide than to join an organised protest over the treatment of fathers in the family courts or of boys in primary schools.

If they are brothers, lifelong friends or military comrades, a man might risk his own life to save another man from killing himself; but he probably won’t raise an eyebrow or lift a finger over the abstract figures for male suicide – even though those figures are certain to get even more terrible.

Suicides by women peaked in the mid-1960s at around 2,400 a year and have fallen gradually ever since. By 1990, when I first wrote about this subject in a national newspaper, about 3,000 men a year were killing themselves. At that point, the number of female suicides was a little more than 1,100 a year.

Drawing attention to the fact that those 3,000 male suicides were greater in number than the total figure for deaths on UK roads, I asked if we should question whether something might be going seriously wrong for men in general that wasn’t happening for women. Those 3,000 suicides have now risen by more than a third in 25 years. Meanwhile the figure for women has barely shifted from around 1,100. The question remains unanswered.

What is the true explanation? Would the Director of Calm have us believe that men over the last 40 years have become even more bovinely incapable of expressing their innermost feelings? Is that the most sympathetic and helpful interpretation our wickedly complacent, woman-centred age can offer?

Above all, why don't men, as whole, care about this question? Why haven't they got anything to say for themselves?

If as many women killed themselves as men, we'd never hear the end of it
* Data: ONS