US suicides hit an all-time high last year
US suicides hit an all-time high last year
Experts caution that suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by higher rates of depression or limited availability of mental health services
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
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I will probably get shit for this, since it's a predominantly left leaning space, but until society starts acknowledging men's issues it will keep getting worse.
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics
In 2021, men died by suicide 3.90x more than women.
In 2021, firearms accounted for 54.64% of all suicide deaths.
This article is an excellent example of what I am talking about. It does not even mention the disparity of suicide rates between the sexes despite it obviously being a huge outlier. Instead, they talk about how guns are the problem, even though a gun is just a method.
Taking away the easy methods to commit suicide might reduce the rate, but it does nothing to address to core issues that make people want to kill themselves in the first place. Instead of 5000 dead people you will have 5000 people who wish they were dead. Mission accomplished.
but until society starts acknowledging men’s issues it will keep getting worse.
Good news. We've moved on from 'man hating' on the left. Intersectional Feminism actually espouses the fact that men are also harmed by the patriarchy and all the ridiculous demands that it puts on us, like not feeling feelings. You should look into it.
Expecting women to help men is like expecting men to give women the right to vote suddenly on their own initiative.
If you’re essentializing the left you’re stuck in meaningless ideology. “Kill All Men” is a good T-shirt and let’s not pretend women shouldn’t look out for women. Intersectional Feminism might have good ad copy but expecting an ideology to cure all problems is a broken (and male-oriented) way of viewing the world.
“If we just get the ideology right the hard work will disappear!” No, men are still going to have to help other men and “Intersectional Feminism” is still going to be either 1) a way to a more nuanced feminism (a good thing for those feminists to develop, don’t get me wrong), or 2) an Extremely Online project of no real consequence.
Why do you think men aren't participating in feminism? We're men helping men over here.
We’re men helping men over here.
No, you're posting online.
Do you personally volunteer at a battered women's shelter? Then you're a male ally.
Do you personally volunteer at a suicide hotline? Then you're a man helping other men (when those men call in).
Otherwise I suspect, admitting that I don't know you, that you think that you're on a team that's the good guys, and that you're the only game in town, and you're threatened that I don't expect feminism to be something that it can't and shouldn't be, no matter how much ideological gymnastics are performed to try and convince men that feminism is on their side.
If you (or your ideology) profess a belief that you're capable of being on everyone's side you are grandiose and delusional. Help the people you can help, especially offline, but don't be an ideological evangelist online because that isn't meaningful participation in our society.
Yes we should try and make a society by everyone, for everyone. Intersectional feminism teaches us that the way to do this is to listen to the people with the experience, not to listen to the ideology which you, @surewhynotlem, are centering.
What I do is speak with troubled anti-women men online to help them understand it's not us vs them, it's all of us vs the system.
Don't gatekeep assistance by setting an arbitrary bar. It's unhelpful.
And what I do is speak with anti-women men online without trying to convert them to an ideology which is based around helping women.
Don’t gatekeep assistance by setting an arbitrary bar. It’s unhelpful.
fuck off? like do you understand how incoherent you are here? no, how could you, your entire ideology is based on the incoherent contradiction of feminism-for-women and feminism-for-everyone.
This is weak.
You claim to want to help men but you insult weakness and drag down people trying to help? I'm sorry, but this undermines everything you're trying to say. At this point I can't even be sure you're not simply a misogynist troll play acting as a leftist.
If you truly care about helping people, consider that attacking other people trying to help is counterproductive. Also consider that your approach is clearly combative, and that anger is something you need to address.
I'm not blocking you because I don't know if you'll see this if I do. But if you reply, I'll know you have.
You need to accept the discomfort of disagreement or you don't have my respect. This isn't just weak shit, it's repugnant: stop trying to police tone. I'm not a misogynist troll just because your feelings got hurt or whatever it is you're trying to cover up.
Weakness doesn't stop existing just because you've read enough theory.
Also consider that your approach is clearly combative, and that anger is something you need to address.
Don't delegitimize anger, that's basically why you're failing here and generally. No shit it's combative. So what?
Just because you're trying to help doesn't mean you're good at helping. You feel motivated to block me, that's another man for the trash can who thought his feminist credentials would, by themselves, prevent his opinions from being critiqued.
it's not tone policing, honey, you're just being an asshole on the internet
Listen to yourself.
We’ve moved on from ‘man hating’ on the left.
How dare you deprive women of the right to hate men for the shitty things that men do?
Intersectional Feminism actually espouses the fact that men are also harmed by the patriarchy
It's not like it's not a "well actually" just because you omitted the "well."
You absolutely can delegitimize the experience men have at the hands of feminism which is composed of humans who don't always get it right. You can do it, with this "well actually," but you're performing an ideological dance for yourself to try and salvage a feminism that doesn't need the help.
Feminism kicks ass and tells women to fuck up men when they deserve it, omni-feminism is weak sauce like this.
What a healthy outlook.
Yes.
I think it is healthier to respect the expression of rage of women and men.
I think it's healthier to expect and understand and embrace the contradictory nature of such expression than to bury it in ideological false unity.
I disagree almost entirely. If you're going to arbitrarily reduce 50% of the population to "those people are the reason for my suffering", then you're a dumb tool, and your rage is childish and shouldn't be encouraged.
You seem to be conflating, "Uh, don't be sexist because you're angry," with "Your emotions are invalid and you shouldn't pursue your own betterment".
I don't think you've understood what I'm trying to say.
If a woman's experience with most of the men in their life is that men are violent rapists, then you had damn well better not tell those women that their rage is childish and shouldn't be encouraged. Should that rage be allowed to guide policy? Yes. Should that rage be allowed to direct policy? No.
Guiding and directing policy are no different for someone who doesn't hold office. I will reiterate again that using your trauma as an excuse to hold bigoted views is childish and that it shouldn't be encouraged.
If in my experience most of the black people in my life were violent rapists, you wouldn't be like, "Wow, yes, you should blame all black people for the actions of the small group that you have interacted with". You would tell me that I was being a dumbshit for idk, blaming an entire group of people for the actions of a few.
I'm not about to play coddle Olympics towards someone who is directing their trauma and frustrations in an unhealthy way. I'm going to sympathize but also direct them towards a healthier approach.
And all (well, most) of that is well and good! But:
I will reiterate again that using your trauma as an excuse to hold bigoted views is childish and that it shouldn’t be encouraged.
All politics is trauma mitigation. And you don't get to tell people that they should just not have their trauma, that they can not bring their trauma to the discussion table, because that isn't actually mitigating the trauma, just suppressing it. Since trauma is experienced intersectionally the unpacking of that trauma necessarily occurs contra another intersection.
If the contest is over who gets to unpack their trauma, you aren't going to succeed at bringing everyone to the table by forcing one ideology (in this case, 'feminism-for-everyone') into a position that is untenably 'omnivorous' (because it contradicts with 'feminism-for-women').
And there is this spectre in your thinking: there is no pure thought, there is no position free from bias, there is no exculpation you can perform to absolve yourself from contamination with the bigotry attendant upon trauma. You can't ask someone who has been robbed at gunpoint by a Black person to be less afraid of Black neighborhoods, regardless of the hurtful bigotry of their acquired bias.
As I heard it, you don't get to have a place free of racism. You can only mitigate its destructive effects.
Because of this, the online tendency to gather ideology into a perfect model rational reasonable list of beliefs is doomed.
Guiding and directing policy are no different for someone who doesn’t hold office.
I think this is plain wrong but I'm having difficulty articulating precisely why.
I think maybe less time on the internet and more time dealing with normies. I seriously doubt the women in my life would be happy to see me suffer even a bit let alone driven to end it because they read militant feminist manifestos.
On average people are average.
The struggle isn't men vs women. It's different mindsets. There are men, women, and other identities who view things in an us vs them bigoted way and then there are those who don't look at what someone is, but how they treat others. The latter tend to be capable of getting along just fine together and use communication skills and emotional maturity to create solidarity with each other rather than pointing fingers at each other and creating absolutist rules and narratives. They show what is possible and are creating change and progress through being the solution of unity and solidarity by simply being cool with each other and not assuming anything about each other based on whatever identities they have.
you tell yourself a pretty story to make you feel better
Free mental healthcare is a pretty leftist stance I think? Solving social issues and getting people the resources and care they need seems like a good way to solve the suicide issue and that's 100% what the left is all about.
Free mental healthcare is a pretty leftist stance I think?
Yes, pro universal healthcare and also pro 2A, liberals not so much.
Hmmm, idk, as a liberal I'm a fan of a well regulated militia.
Not so much a fan of my serial abuser father and his gun collection. His father killed himself a few years ago, that greatly increases his chances of suicide, and his type is likely to go out "in a blaze of glory".
I'm all for universal health care, but his court required therapy was "just government indoctrination", you can't help everyone, but you can regulate their ability to hurt others.
But I guess that makes me anti 2a, either with you or against you right?
Free mental healthcare is a great idea, but it will only partially solve the problem. Men tend to use mental healthcare way less than women. Where I live (where it's basically free) there are some efforts to get men into programs, like support groups specifically for men, but these don't change the situation much. There needs to be a cultural change as well, aside from societal improvements to better everybody's lives.
Is there evidence that mental healthcare lowers the chances of suicide?
I will probably get shit for this, since it's a predominantly left leaning space, but until society starts acknowledging men's issues it will keep getting worse.
???
What left leaning circles have you been in? I think we all know men have issues too?
In my left leaning circles it's pretty well understood that feminism is about helping women. And that's a good thing. Trying to make feminism an ideology which serves all genders is problematic because it implies an omniscient perspective counter to proper intersectionality. Men experience oppression but only men can represent their oppression in discourse.
Women can't and shouldn't feel like they can have an opinion on men's issues. "Stay in your lane" comes to mind.
How far do you take this perspective? As a lefty that doesn't sound like a very leftist take, rather it sort of completely eschews the principles of solidarity and reason-based argumentation...
I do agree that feminism is about helping women (and that's great!), but should mothers not advocate for better mental health resources for their sons? Should I not advocate for better access to birth control for the women in my life because I'm male or for Ukrainian liberty because I'm not Ukrainian? Denying someone access to public discourse about a topic because they're not suffering the consequences of the topic seems a bit silly to me. And of course, men do actually suffer under patriarchy, albeit in a different way than women obviously.
I am taking some rhetorical leeway towards a more radical presentation of the perspective, for clarity.
Solidarity can only be achieved once people can recognize one another as equals, and "women tell men how men should advocate for themselves" is not equal recognition. Of course women don't think they're womansplaining the oppression men experience.
I don't believe in reason-based argumentation. Reason is how consent is manufactured. I trust reason only within the confines of the emotional message a so-called rational actor is emitting within the performance of the ritual of discourse. Too many women have been told to shut up for being 'unreasonable' for me to take reasonability all that seriously.
Certainly mothers should perform their motherhood within this lens. Their motherhood is centered, not the primacy of their opinion. The mistake the essentialization&monopolization type feminists make is centering feminism, when an ideology is not a cure for anything except the nagging sensation that if we come up with and communicate the right ideas the problems will go away.
Regardless of your gender, you are coming across as quite unreasonable.
I’m not even sure the point you’re trying to make.
Then read it again. And don't police tone.
Oh yeah no clue why you’re coming off as unreasonable.
I have explicitly told you I don't care if I come off as unreasonable, so what's your problem?
Please, I’m asking nicely, watch your tone. Your italics are upsetting me.
At least they could have the social courtesy to hop on the digital bandwagon and use autotone.
Take responsibility for yourself.
To be clear here, when I say "reason" I mean the fundamental capability humans have to use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors. If this is the understanding you had when you wrote your comment I suppose we just disagree fundamentally, and that'd be an exceptional take on the matter.
We can be both emotionally and logically intelligent creatures, the two aren't mutually exclusive and reducing people to their base emotional responses takes away from their agency. In my experience people are typically much more reason-based in their decision-making, even people who are victims of the term "unreasonable woman". We don't go around doing things just because.
I don't think I shall commit to the insane proposition that humans use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors when climate change is currently killing the planet's ecosystems off. To some extent I think you've got a high bar to clear for that proposition to be accepted!
Jokes or half-jokes aside, it's not a new observation that people rationalize their politics after having decided what it is they feel. I've seen too much consensus reality with completely reasonable paragraph after paragraph to take reason all that seriously.
But I do believe that people are 'reasonable' in the way that you say: we don't go around doing things just because (and to the extent that we do, it's a good thing!). It's when a group of people gather around a list of reasons that become an ideology that I start to get twitchy.
Feminism is a great movement but men who apply it as an ideology have missed something fundamental about the basis for reason in the expression of emotion.
I think you can help people and stand up for people being hurt regardless of what you got in your pants. Yes, education and personal experience may allow you to do a better job at it clearly a medical professsional can solve problems that I cant for example, but most of the time I think basic empathy can get you pretty far.
A homeless woman this week asked me for water, I gave her a bottle of water. I don't think I need to be a women or ten courses of feminism to know that humans need water to survive.
I can't think of a single left leaning space that is not concerned or empathetic about the mental health of men. I can think of several right leaning spaces that dismiss men's mental health struggles with "stop being a snowflake and man up."
It also does not even mention the disparity of suicide stats between different ethnic groups.
US demographics use "race" instead of ethnicity but the stats still point to a massive disparity with American Indian or Alaska Natives having suicide rates in the 20s (compared to overall rates of around 14 -14.9 per 100,000). Black and Hispanic people also have higher suicide rates.
It's worth noting that also according to that article women attempt suicide 1.3x as often as men -- but men are more likely to use guns so they end up dying more. It seems to me guns are a core part of the issue
So let's pretend we get rid of guns; now we have thousands of people that still wish they were dead. Some will find other ways to die.
That's the point the other poster was making. We gotta treat the core problems, not just the symptoms.
Except the core poster says men have it worse when objectively women are attempting suicide more often.
The issue isn't that people are committing suicide with firearms, or even that they're committing suicide. The issue is that people are miserable and hate their lives.
Technology has us more isolated from each other and people have less friends now than they did 20 years ago.
I think the majority of ppl want that stuff better for everyone, toxic masculinity hurts women and men. there's definitely some very vocal sexists on both sides though
The only reason a "left leaning" space would argue with you over that is when you start blaming women or feminism for mens issues.
As a man who is suicidal pretty much constantly, I know my issues are my own. I've failed, not society, but I also know that 5000 people who wish they were dead aren't dead yet and so there's still a chance things can change. I'd say gun control can be part of the solution, but I do also agree that we should be discussing what makes people suicidal and especially seeing why one segment of a population feels it more than others.
For me personally, I just feel like a complete failure in all aspects of life and can't find any direction that I care to pursue to get me "on track." I'm also such a mixed bag of 1000 different "types" that I have something for everyone to dislike as far as finding a partner. I would never blame women for wanting what they want, so while I enjoy my interests and stand firm in not wanted to live with a dog, I just have to accept that I'm not anyone's cup of tea.
So tldr on that bit, I'm the problem, not society.
You exist, and you are who you are, and that is ok. You may believe that you have failed, and feel guilty or ashamed of that, and that's ok too. You sound lonely, rejected, and really hurt by your experiences, "something for everyone to dislike". These feelings suck, but internalizing them and telling yourself that you are a problem can be really unhelpful. You are worthy of acceptance, with what flaws you see in yourself. This isn't really a great forum for personal, intimate discussion, but I do hope you can talk about your experiences with someone you trust.
Hey man, you don't have to hold the world up by itself. Not everything is your responsibility. In fact a lot of what people are saying here that are causing these spikes are a result of isolation and society failing our people. All out individualism isn't that great for people. We need interdependence because we can't do this all alone. We need that sense of community that has all but been demolished. It's good that you aren't blaming others for your problems, but also, society could be more helpful/beneficial to you instead of kicking you to the curb instead of making everything seem hopeless. It could provide you the tools to climb out instead of leaving you in the well.
All this to say, is that please don't be ashamed to ask for help. None of us would've gotten this far without help from others.
One aspect you might have to separate is the gun control advocates who just want to cite another reason for X or Y policies. Those people aren't necessarily advocating for mental health.
As an example take waiting periods. They might do something for first time buyers but the policy doesn't really make sense for the people who already have a safe full of guns to pick from. I don't hear those people talk about programs like "hold my guns" either.
No one talks about why women go through with suicide less, either. One of the reasons can very likely be that more women are the caregiver of their parents or children since the bigger number of men who commit suicide stems from the amount of men who are lonely but who also do not have to care for other people.
until society starts acknowledging men’s issues
I wonder what gives you the impression that society doesn't acknowledge men's issues?
Well, since gun control in this country is basically verboten, one of the simplest ways to reduce suicide is a non-starter.
I know you mean well but you're like the person who makes suicidal tendencies more powerful because you want to shut all the windows in a burning building because you personally find falling bodies less aesthetically pleasing than burning ones.
As someone who thinks that people should have the right to end their life, I still think guns might be an issue because they can make it very quick and allow no time to think it through. Even some of the other accessible methods take some preparation, and each step is a chance to think again.
I understood this perspective already. You'd rather process suicide into a pipeline in which "reasonable" suicide is more common than deal with the factors driving people to suicide.
Your need to control the "problem" is part of the overbearing control driving people to suicide. It's my opinion that you'd be better off accepting the choice and not trying to second-guess men who shoot themselves, even if they're drunk, impulsive, or any manner of "irrational" about it. (Rationality is a myth designed to sell more socially approved behaviors.)
I agree with you in the sense much left leaning conversation tends to tribalize to specific groups. Im super left leaning but I want things that benefit everyone. universal healthcare, universal education, publicization of anything that is to essential or without robust enough competition to be run by the market, citizens income. Gun control as a local issue (you can't bring guns into my house, you can't bring guns into my business, you can't bring guns into our town, you can't bring guns into our state) and federal (limitations on capability especially rate of fire, clip size, electronic assist). Legalization of suicide along with all other bodily autonomy. I find both sides like to look at things as this group or that group but I want general things myself.