Why are men suiciding?

It's not hard to see part of the answer. Put the numbers together with the facts.

Nuance and OzInfoNews published a report on the new Frankston Family Resource Centre. One of the glaring facts is that all the employees were women.

If a man goes into the new FRC, he faces a hostile cadre of women -- much as I found at Victorian Legal Aid a few years ago.

If the Family Resource Centres are to work, they will have to be staffed equally by men and women. Otherwise, they are just a sham.

First, there are half the number of professional psychologists in the country, and most of those are in specialties or teaching. And for good reason, that's where the money is and where they can be employed.

If a man calls an agency to get help, he talks to a woman, not a man. There are a handful of agencies across Australia for men. Literally a handful. And all they can do is direct a man to NGO services.

Taking nothing from the NGOs, they're doing great work against a sea of need, but they are really not funded, trained or equipped to deal with the problems they face daily. Many are just locally-organized support groups that are forced to fund themselves, like the Injured Persons' Support group I was working with.

When a man does look for help, he finds himself looking at a building full of women -- women who have been trained to be unsympathetic to his problems -- and if he goes so far as to ask for help, there will rarely be anywhere for him to go.

The few professional services are designed to deal with women.

80% of the members of the APS are women.
They have little or no idea how a man thinks; all they can do is try to empathize. Men in crisis need to talk to men. That idea has been established for women, and it holds true for men.

Men are left simply stranded by the lack of professional services, is it any wonder that they have formed a deep distrust of the psych professions?

While 5 times as many men as women suicide in the urban areas, in the bush it's much worse. I only found one place that cited it (and now I have to look it up again!), but in the bush 7-8 times as many men are committing suicide as women. The bush suicides are partially driving up the disproportion in the statistics.

These criminal disproportions have led to some painfully comical funding disparities.
Dads in Distress is almost the only national agency for men in crisis; yet the federal government gave DiDs one-fifth the fund to run a national program as it gave a women's coffee clutch in Sydney: $50,000 as opposed to $250,000 to go for a cappucino with the girls.

Now, pretend that $50,000 is adequate to run such a necessary national program.

Paul Donley