Everyone has their own opinion of #malesuicide, and the invisible undercurrent of anti-male bigotry that is now woven into modern society.
Social media often amplifies these hostile views of men as a kind of ‘advocacy’ (which it isn’t), centring the loudest voices, at the cost of nuanced and well-meaning debate.
This voice has failed suicidal men, which is an epidemic that we are now in-part responsible for perpetuating.
Look around you –
We’ve arrived at a time where to call a vulnerable man, on the verge of suicide, ‘toxic’ is an approved form of social justice.
An intervention even, used by low-life psychologists and angry social media acolytes, to deprive suicidal men of any kind of compassion or humanity.
Whilst this malevolent view of men and masculinity only becomes more confusing when combined with the popular meme of ‘men can talk’.
What….?
Open up to the people who literally name everything bad in the world after me, and consider me an oppressor?
No thanks. I’ll pass.
So when I meet a male suicide researcher, with a doctorate in the subject, who has spent years intertwined within the tales and trauma of thousands of suicidal men and bereaved families, and who shares in my disappointment, I find it validating.
Dr Susie Bennett has conducted some of the most important research ever done into male suicide.
She’s recently had her seminal meta-synthesis of male suicide published in the Psychological Bulletin.
More recently still, Bennett and a panel of 10 international experts, and hundreds of lived experience experts across 34 countries, have crafted a groundbreaking new agenda on male suicide research.
The truth is I’ll run out of characters in this caption before I can explain Susie’s credentials in full, but trust me, she’s an expert – both as a researcher, and perhaps more so as a whole hearted human being, brimming with the very compassion we so desperately need.
But you don’t always need such credentials to see what’s happening to our men and boys…
Sometimes it just takes a visit to the greeting card section of a gift shop…
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Podcast by @manup.how with @male_suicide_research
#malesuicideawareness #fyp #mensmentalhealth
2024-03-26