Sorting Out Puzzle of Male Suicide

Joan Ryan

San Francisco Chronicle

In a recent column about a UC Davis freshman who shot himself, I included a statistic from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Boys commit 86 percent of all adolescent suicides.

Eighty-six percent.

The number floored me, particularly as the mother of a son. Yet not a single e-mail, phone call or letter about the column mentioned the striking statistic.

It occurred to me that if 86 percent of adolescent suicides were girls, there would be a national commission to find out why. There'd be front-page stories and Oprah shows and nonprofit foundations throwing money at sociologists and psychologists to study female self-destruction. My feminist sisters and I would be asking, rightly, "What's wrong with a culture that drives girls, much more than boys, to take their own lives?"

So why aren't we asking what's wrong with a culture that drives boys, much more than girls, to take their own lives? Even in academia, where you can find studies on the most obscure topics, there is little research explaining why boys are disproportionately killing themselves. The Center for Adolescence at Stanford, a nationally recognized clearinghouse on teen behavior, has no one on its long roster of experts who can speak on the topic. Neither does the American Association of Suicidology, an organization dedicated to suicide prevention since 1968.

"As much as I would love to lead the charge (in finding out why boys kill themselves), try to go out and get funding for it," said Lanny Berman, the executive director of the association. He is frustrated that funders aren't interested in studying boys and men.

"If there is no research money available, no academician is going to go that route," he said. "As executive director, I have to pay attention to fundable projects."

So the association has an expert on female suicide but none on male suicide, even though suicide is an overwhelmingly male issue well beyond adolescence. Of the 30,622 Americans of all ages who took their own lives in 2001, 24,672 were men. I have been thinking about the people I know who committed suicide. My grandfather. My Uncle Tommy. Two of my of father's closest friends. And, most recently, the UC Davis freshman who is my friend's son. All men. I had never noticed.

And it's not just an American phenomenon. Worldwide, men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women. (China is the only country where men and women kill themselves in about equal numbers.)

Some will argue that these statistics don't tell the whole story and are even misleading. And to some extent, they would be right. Girls and women attempt suicide at much higher rates than boys and men. So there is good reason to be concerned about girls, too.

But most girls and women, fortunately, survive. They live to tell about it. They can get counseling and address the problems that made them suicidal. They survive, in great part, because they choose methods -- taking pills or cutting themselves -- that allow for rescue or a change of heart, methods that often simply fall short of completing the job. Boys and men tend to use guns or ropes, which result in a much higher "completion rate," to use the experts' language.

But to chalk up boys' high suicide rate simply to a different choice of method is to ignore the reasons they make those choices. They could, of course, choose methods that are not so immediately lethal. They don't, which means they don't give anyone a chance to help them, and this seems to be the crucial factor in understanding the suicide disparity between males and females.

This is what Berman of the suicidology association found a few years ago when he put together the association's one report on the topic, thanks to a small grant. Women are socialized to feel little or no shame about being vulnerable or dependent. But for men, seeking help suggests weakness and incompetence. It is antithetical to the traditional male role. Power and control are critically important to men, dating back surely to the days when a man's job was to hunt dangerous prey. In their minds, seeking help means ceding power and control to someone else. It means allowing themselves to be vulnerable.

I am always surprised -- though I shouldn't be by now -- at how differently men and women connect with each other, particularly during a time of crisis. My husband and his friends can spend the whole day together playing golf or watching a ball game and go home without having gleaned any personal information. A guy can be going through a divorce and his friends might never know. The topic might never come up, even if the guy is crushed by the split.

Women, or at least the women I know, would return home with the complete history of the relationship, the exact wording, setting and context of the key break-up conversation, the name and credentials of the therapist she's seeing.

The feminist movement helped us recognize that we needed to be explicit in teaching girls that it was OK to be smart, competitive and independent. Now we need to be explicit in teaching our boys that it is OK to be vulnerable and to ask for help. We need to give them the emotional language that does not come naturally to them. At home and at school, we need to teach boys -- and reinforce for girls -- that the brain needs tending just as the body does, and that when brains get sick, they need doctors to help them heal.

Just as we enlisted fathers to empower their daughters, we need them now to empower their sons. We mothers can tell our sons to talk about their feelings, to teach them the signs of depression, to say it's OK to ask for help. But they learn how to be men from their fathers.

If fathers say openly and repeatedly that acknowledging depression and sadness is not a sign of personal weakness but of superior judgment, if they say that getting help is their obligation as men so they can be good partners and providers, then maybe we have a chance at changing the centuries of hard-wiring that makes boys and men so much more violent than women -- whether toward others or toward themselves.

And maybe more of our sons will live long enough to pass along those lessons to their sons.