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Why Male Suicide Prevention Requires Policy, Not Just Awareness
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic.
Sep 10, 2025
Today is September 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. The hashtags are already out. Politicians are tweeting about “awareness.” Nonprofits are posting hotline numbers. News outlets will run a few stories, maybe a profile of a grieving family or a segment on rising youth anxiety. Communities will hold vigils and light candles. And then, as happens every September, Congress will return to debating budgets that cut the very services that keep people alive.
Suicide has become an annual ritual of shock, treated as if it were a hurricane that blew in unannounced instead of a slow-moving crisis we have been measuring for decades.
Suicide is not weather. It is not random. It is patterned, predictable, and preventable. Rates climb where jobs collapse and housing becomes unstable. They spread where guns are plentiful and mental healthcare is scarce. They grow in cultures that equate vulnerability with weakness. And they accelerate when elected officials strip away the programs that keep people from falling over the edge.
I know the consequences of silence. My father died by suicide when I was young. For more than a decade, I did not know how he died. My family believed silence could protect me. But silence also isolates, leaving questions that cannot be asked and grief that cannot be named. That fog never fully lifts. It is a reminder that behind every statistic is a family that carries loss forward, often without words for it.
That loss is now multiplied across nearly 50,000 American families each year. Almost 50,000 people died by suicide in 2022—the highest number ever recorded—and nearly 50,000 again in 2023. That is one death every 11 minutes. Three out of four were men. Men are half the country yet nearly 80% of its suicides. The rate for men over 85 is the highest of any group, 15 times higher than women of the same age. Middle-aged men follow close behind, especially in rural counties where work has dried up, institutions have withered, and guns are everywhere. Even among younger men, suicide remains a leading cause of death.
The methods matter. More than half of suicides now involve a firearm. Men are far more likely than women to use a gun, and that choice often makes the difference between an attempt and a death. A gun is immediate and almost always fatal. A moment of despair becomes permanent because the tool at hand was designed to be permanent. Where lethal means are easy and care is scarce, brief despair turns irreversible. States with higher gun ownership have higher suicide rates. The connection is not mysterious. It is arithmetic.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced.
Economics tell the same story. Men who lose jobs, homes, or the ability to provide are at higher risk. One national study found that more than 1 in 5 men aged 45 to 64 who died by suicide had recently lost a job, faced eviction, or been buried by debt. When a man’s sense of worth is tied to being a provider, losing that role can feel like losing his reason to live. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called these “deaths of despair,” and the label fits. But despair is not destiny. Raise the minimum wage, expand tax credits, stabilize housing, and suicides among working-class men decline. Let wages stagnate, strip away safety nets, and suicides rise. If despair tracks wages and rent, then budgets decide who lives long enough to get help.
Budgets are moral documents. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed cutting more than a billion dollars from the nation’s main mental health agency. That means fewer clinics, fewer treatment teams, fewer crisis counselors. The same budget threatened to scrap parts of the 988 crisis line, including its LGBTQ youth service. At the Department of Education, $1 billion in school counselor grants was pulled back, leaving rural districts that had finally hired mental health staff facing layoffs. Insurance rules that would have forced companies to cover therapy on par with physical health were paused. On homelessness, the administration reversed Housing First, vowing instead to sweep encampments, force treatment, and “bring back asylums.” Each of these choices falls hardest on men. When Medicaid is cut, when housing supports vanish, when community clinics close, the men most in need are left to cycle through emergency rooms, jails, or morgues.
Policy failures meet cultural stigma. Only about a third of men say they would seek professional help if depressed, compared to nearly 60% of women. The rest say they would handle it on their own, or not at all. That reluctance is reinforced by leaders and influencers. US President Donald Trump once suggested veterans with PTSD “aren’t strong.” Andrew Tate tells millions of young men that “depression isn’t real.” Jordan Peterson blames despair on feminism and political correctness. These voices frame pain as weakness, recast systemic causes as personal failings, and tell men that asking for help makes them lesser. For someone already on the edge, that message can be lethal.
And when suicide is mentioned in politics, it is often weaponized rather than addressed. Commentators invoke male suicide to claim that society only cares about women or minorities. Lawmakers cite “what’s happening to our boys” while voting against Medicaid expansion or school mental health funding. Grievance substitutes for prevention. The fire is pointed to, then the water is cut.
The alternative is straightforward, if not simple. Treat the 988 crisis line like 911: permanent, funded, universal. Expand Medicaid and enforce insurance parity so therapy is covered like any other medical need. Keep counselors in schools. Invest in housing with voluntary supports. Build mobile crisis teams so despair meets a trained counselor, not a police squad. And meet men where they are: union halls, barber shops, job sites, veterans’ groups.
We know this works. In Colorado, “Man Therapy” has used humor and direct language to reach men who would never otherwise consider counseling. Veterans’ peer networks reduce stigma and improve follow-through on care. In Australia, the “Men’s Shed” movement has built thousands of local spaces where older men gather, work on projects, and informally support one another—a model credited with reducing isolation and depression. These are not small-scale experiments. They are blueprints for national policy.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced. It falls when care is reachable, affordable, and treated as normal. My father’s death remains a personal loss. But the broader crisis is a collective choice. We know the patterns. We know the risks. We know the solutions. What remains is whether policymakers are willing to act on them.
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is not whether we will keep raising awareness. It is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic. If policymakers can count the dead, they can also count the votes that decide whether men keep dying at this scale. The choice is not between silence and hashtags. It is between burying another 50,000 next year—or building a country where men live long enough to be heard.
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Trump’s ‘Shock-and-Awe’ Approach to Governing Is as Deluded as W’s Iraq War
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
Sep 09, 2025
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While US President Donald Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9-11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria, and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
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Neoliberalism in France Receives a New Blow as Yet Another Government Falls
France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right to the hard-left refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes.
Sep 08, 2025
Europe’s second-largest economy has plunged into political paralysis again, as the French government has been overthrown by yet another no-confidence vote. This time, the no-confidence vote was against Prime Minister François Bayrou and his proposals to reduce the country’s public deficit from a projected 5.4% in 2025 to 4.6% in 2026—and to fall within the European 3% by 2029—with highly unpopular measures that would have included a “freeze” on government spending, over 5.3 billion euros in cuts to local authorities, and 5 billion euros in cuts in the country’s healthcare budget, yet with plans underway to significantly boost defense spending in the next few years. Bayrou’s 2026 budget envisaged in total around 44 billion euros ($51.3 billion) in cuts, tax increases, and even the scrapping of two public holidays, with the latter stirring as much outcry in France as the austerity budget itself.
Essentially, France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right National Rally (RN) to the hard-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes. The collapse of the Bayrou government was not a surprise, and some of us had even predicted that it would “meet the same fate” as the government that preceded it, namely that of Michel Barnier. Indeed, there is no other country in Europe with continuous anti-neoliberal struggles as France. Opposition to the normalization of the neoliberal socioeconomic reality has been in constant motion since the mid-1990s when President Jacques Chirac launched a direct attack on the foundational principles of the welfare state.
However, since assuming the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and his various governments (France has a semi-presidential system) have sought to shove neoliberalism down people’s throats at a record-breaking speed. Unsurprisingly enough, in a recent IFOP poll conducted for Le Journal du Dimanche, French President Emmanuel Macron and his now ousted Prime Minister François Bayrou emerged as the most unpopular leadership duo in the history of the Fifth Republic.
On August 25, Bayrou, who wanted to be known as “Mr. Anti-Debt,” stunned even his political allies when he announced that he would call for a vote in the National Assembly for his neoliberal budget proposals to rescue France from its ailing finances. It was a political grenade that no one had expected. Moreover, Bayrou did so even though he was fully aware of the fact that he was not, in all likelihood, going to avoid the collapse of his government. In fact, he seems to have predicted the outcome of the confidence vote on Monday, September 8, when he said on a radio interview just a few days earlier, in a rather philosophical and quintessentially French fashion, that “there are worse disasters in life than the collapse of the government.”
The most obvious reason why Bayrou gambled with a confidence vote on his plans to reduce France’s public deficit is because he had miscalculated all along the concerns of the French people about deficits and debt. He had embarked on a PR campaign to convince the public that the future of France was at stake on account on the nation’s worrying state of financial affairs. He employed distressful images by invoking the Greek debt crisis of the early 2010s as a warning of what might happen to France and spoke with an apparent earnestness of the possibility of a market meltdown if the French government failed to act boldly and quickly. In his speech to the National Assembly ahead of the confidence vote, Bayrou said that France’s excessive debt load is “life-threatening.”
Yet, typical of neoliberal attitudes and self-serving policies, Bayrou failed all along to realize that while the average French citizens were not insensitive to the realities of the country running a budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP and a national debt of 114% of GDP, they found socially unacceptable the neoliberal economic measures proposed for addressing its financial woes. One could say that, from their own point of view, if the organization of the economy along the principles of neoliberal capitalism is the cause of France’s financial woes, then neoliberalism certainly could not be the answer to their solution. Indeed, an IFOP survey conducted in July found that 57% of respondents believed that a plan was needed to reduce the country’s public deficit and national debt, but only 26% found the measures to be “just.”
The French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
As a matter of fact, both Bayrou and Macron failed to grasp the fact that it is neoliberalism itself that has fueled the surge both of RN and the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties that won the largest number of seats in the snap parliamentary election that was held in July 2024, even if the far-right and the hard-left are worlds apart in terms of the overall social and political values that they embrace and advocate.
There is, however, an additional and probably more important reason why Bayrou gambled on a confidence vote over his neoliberal budget proposal even though he knew that the odds of carrying the day were stacked against him. He was hoping that his decision to do so would compel lawmakers in the National Assembly to think twice about toppling his government by reflecting on the impeding consequences stemming from the planned actions of the grassroots protest movement organized around the cry “Block everything” (“Bloquons tout”), scheduled for September 10. The movement’s organizers hope to bring the country to a complete standstill (which, coincidentally, is what the US needs in light of the autocratic actions of President Donald Trump which are turning the country into a third world dictatorship), but the prevailing climate in French politics and society is such these days that even mainstream political parties have offered backing to this nationwide shutdown that will, apparently, take place even with the collapse of the Bayrou government.
Love it or hate it, one must agree that French politics is never boring. More important, the protest movements in the country—starting at least with the French opposition to the Algerian war, later on with the May ’68 events and more recently with the yellow vest protests and now with the new protest movement dubbed “Block everything”--should provide tremendous inspiration to popular struggles against exploitation, oppression, and social injustices everywhere in the world.
What French President Emmanuel Macron’s move might be following the collapse of Bayrou’s government remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it would be politically naive of him to think that a new government will fare better in the future if it insists on pushing neoliberal measures as a solution to the country’s financial woes. For the French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
Indeed, even the center-right in France, which in recent years has rallied around Emmanuel Macron and his neoliberal vision, has generally been very cautious about the Anglo-American economic model with its attack on government and worship of the market. No doubt, this is why the prevailing sentiment in France is that not only Macron’s governments cannot sustain themselves in the current political climate but that Macron himself is finished and must go.
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