Men Commit Suicide…yes, but…

Male suicide rates are unignorable, women most affected.

Depending on the stats you use, the suicide rate for men in the U.S. is 3.5 to 5 times the rate for women. If these numbers applied to women, the response would necessitate a congressional suicide crisis task force, and a month would be officially designated women’s suicide prevention month. I mentioned these facts on the Dr. Phil show (aired in February), and except for Dr. Richard Reeves, the entire show was incredulous.

Were this the case, we’d never hear an end of why women kill themselves – likely all due to men’s misogyny. We certainly wouldn’t dismiss women’s suicides as their own fault for not seeking mental and emotional counseling. We wouldn’t wonder why women didn’t talk about their suicidal ideations with their extensive social networks of girlfriends. We wouldn’t think women need to toughen up and be more like men to resolve the catastrophically sexist suicide rates. We wouldn’t think they deserved what they got.

But this is what we reserve for men’s suicide. Evolutionarily speaking, sperm is cheap, eggs are scarce, and men are expected to sacrifice their lives for the security and betterment of women. And yes, even in the patriarchal social orders of the past. A man’s character was, and is, defined by his sacrifice and the value that it produces. But mandatory male conscription (Selective Service) and the unignorably high male suicide rates are something women still won’t accept as a pretty raw deal for men. In Ukraine, all men between 15 and 60 were obligated to take up arms and defend their country. For women, this duty was optional. The unspoken reality is this; in evolutionary terms, women are the protected, vulnerable sex, and men are the disposable, sacrificial sex.

Men will always be more disposable than women, and women instinctively understand this. As such, the female psyche evolved to reconcile men’s disposability to move on from the discomfort of men’s sacrifices. Today, nothing serves that rationalization better than the meme of “toxic masculinity.” Men’s suicides can never be attributed to anything less than their fragile egos. This makes them victims of their socially implanted “toxic” masculinity. A female narrative would have men put a noose around their necks to live up to a socially constructed definition of masculinity. Therefore, the male suicide rate is attributable to men’s fragile egos, self-pity, and inability to live up to being a ‘real man’ caricature that some nebulous Patriarchy created for them. Toxic masculinity is the perfect social convention to absolve women of the guilt of men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self-sacrifice, so women had to evolve psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger.

Men succeed at suicide because it’s mostly a pragmatic decision, not an emotional one. Calling them “Deaths of Despair” is only half the picture. Why do men take their lives in alarmingly high numbers compared to women? The demographics for male suicide show consistent patterns. Men are 2 to 3 times more likely to kill themselves after a job loss and eight times more likely to commit suicide after a divorce. In addition, 7 in 10 suicides are men (majority white) between 45 and 65. Gynocentric media waves away these stats with toxic masculinity and men’s so-called stubbornness in seeking psychiatric help for depression because “men think it makes them look weak.” Again, this absolves women’s complacency but ignores any conversation about what would motivate men, particularly in this demographic, to commit suicide. There’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide. Any associated guilt, remorse, or cognitive dissonance about men’s deaths is assuaged with easy cultural narratives about pathetic maleness.  

There has never been a generation of more purposeless men than today. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function. We are innate idealists. We look outward at the world and like to imagine what could be possible. An inherent part of our evolved mental firmware predisposes us to deductive problem-solving and improvisation. Much of that comes as an adaptation to women’s innate need for men who can display cues of competency. And at no other time has men’s competency been so devalued and debased. Year after year, men become increasingly superfluous to women. At no other time has the equity in what a man can provide or create or solve been so implicitly unnecessary to women — and the sacrifices men make to achieve this competency become more meaningless as men age.

When men commit suicide, they make a practical decision, not an emotional one. While I wouldn’t presume that a guy’s emotional state isn’t influential in his suicide, how he makes that decision is attributable to men’s deductive nature.  Right up to the day he hung himself, my brother-in-law showed no outward signs of emotional distress. He seemingly accepted that the wife he had lived his life for would be leaving him soon. He was very matter-of-fact. It’s how men are when they’ve resolved something for themselves. When a guy seems to be taking things in stride, we don’t want to create a problem where we see none. If there’s no smoke, there’s no fire. If a guy seems unperturbed about some misfortune, we see it as a sign of character. He’ll be okay. He’s got a positive mindset.

When we look at the high rate of male suicide in this demographic, we see how men make this end-of-life decision. Everything they’ve built up to 45-65 is now debased and devalued. It’s simple to erase a man’s value today. All the equity they’ve committed their lives to create – doing the right thing – is as if it never mattered. Thus, men are confronted with a choice: rebuild themselves, reconstruct a new life, and tough it out, or simply, pragmatically erase themselves. The older a man gets, the less time he has to build back the equity he had that took so long to achieve. And considering the casual ease with which his previous status was erased, the choice becomes simpler the older he gets. 

A Gynocentric society looks for absolution for men’s suicides by blaming them for not being more like women. They say, “It’s a “mental health” issue. It’s a “toxic masculinity” issue. If men would open up and be vulnerable, they would feel it’s okay to seek help. These are female-emotional rationales for the glaring male suicide rate, but they ignore that men don’t calculate suicide as women do. Men and women are fundamentally different; we kill ourselves for different reasons. But even when men’s suicide rate becomes unignorable, we can’t even let them have that. So we create counter-narratives to bring women into the horrific male space of suicide. Now we hear, “Men successfully kill themselves more often, but women think about killing themselves more often.” Therefore, we have to balance out this sexist sympathy for men’s suicide, dismiss it wholesale, and move on from the uncomfortable truth if women are ever to feel better about themselves.