Broadcast on 22 August 2018 in the UK (link here for UK TV licence fee payers), Dr Alexander 'Xand' Van Tulleken presented an episode of the BBC's popular science series, Horizon, called "Stopping Male Suicide", whose programme description promised to discover (my emphasis):

"why suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK - causing more deaths in this group than car accidents, and even more than cancer"

I think the programme is worth watching (if you can access it), but it is highly affecting and quite hard to watch at times (not surprisingly given the subject).

The programme started with some promise, with Van Tulleken noting that when he'd been younger he'd found:

"the idea of anyone trying to take their own life impossible to relate to"

But then he mentions financial worries and broken relationships and most importantly he explains that:

"I've got a son who lives thousands of miles away, which I feel very guilty about. I worry about him; I worry about his future."

Crucially, the programme was then at pains to point out that while mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder (BPD) and depression are significant risk factors:

"The majority of people diagnosed with a mental illness will never go on to attempt suicide"

It was from this point that the early promise that the programme might address these issues from a fresh perspective soon began to fade out of sight, as Van Tulleken went to interview the editor of Men's Health magazine (UK), who had this to say:

"All men these days subscribe to the idea of the 'New man' ... but I think men are struggling to reconcile that with an older, shall we say, idea of masculinity, which is still hard-wired - certainly into a certain generation - 30 to 50 year-olds.

"And so I think through our survey we learnt that men still define themselves by their career: it gives them a sense of self-esteem; I think people, uh, men, of a certain age think very much that they should be the breadwinner and supporting the family.

"And they're struggling [in] trying to reconcile those different ideas, resulting in this kind of isolation and panic and withdrawal."

This is pretty much the feminist line - that hegemonic and toxic forms of masculinity, the need to be successful, to be the breadwinner, to be the provider - means they try to shoulder a burden that would be far easier to carry if only they would stop being so damn 'selfish' and offload 50% of that weight onto their (female) partners. The near impossibility of the task is what is leading them to kill themselves.

Immediately after this scene, the glimmer of promise returns when Van Tulleken notes that in the UK, the rate of make suicide is 35% higher in the North East - where there are high levels of unemployment and poverty - than in London.

Here, it is also strongly hinted at that there is a causal link between financial worries - ones especially brought on by unemployment - which in turn lead to relationship problems and eventual breakdown and which in turn are likely to result in homelessness. Added to all this, if bereavement and grief are present, the chances of suicidal ideation sky-rocket.

At this point, they interview a man from the North-East, Tony, whose best mate Danny had committed suicide not long after losing his job. Tony, not long after, then loses his own job, goes bankrupt, becomes homeless and therefore loses access to his six-month old daughter. With all that going on, we learn that Tony tried (unsuccessfully) to hang himself. At the end of the programme, we also learn that yet another of Tony's close friends had taken his life after the programme had finished filming.

Finally, at this point, I was thinking that they would get to the nub of the issue and focus on the fact that what is killing men is not some fantastical notion of 'hegemonic masculinity' but what's actually happening to them in their lives.

But then something weird happened - something that was so weird that I would ask anyone else in the UK to take a look at it because it is hugely suspicious from an ideological point of view (go to 21:56 on the clock).

Van Tulleken goes to see Shirley Smith, a woman who lost her 19 year-old son to suicide, of a charity called If U Care, Share. In her office, Smith keeps a map of the area (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne region) in which she sticks pins that show where suicides take place:

"The pink, are female. The blue, are male." (There are also colourless pins, but these are not explained)

As she's saying this, the camera has cuts to the small town of Consett, which is thick with pins - a thick cluster of 15 pink pins, in between which are dotted just 5 blue pins; a further 10 colourless pins are visible.

Not only is it startling to see the pink pins outnumber the blue ones by 3 to 1 (i.e. the actual rate at which men commit suicide compared to women), but when the camera pulls away to show another part of the map, around Durham, it shows two tight clusters of 15 pins - all blue - and another of 12 or 13 pins - again all blue. When later the camera pulls away to show the map of the whole region the charity covers, it shows a board of overwhelmingly blue pins except for - weirdly - the small town of Consett - which was the one covered in pink pins the camera landed on first. But this does not stop Van Tulleken from gasping in shock:

"What I guess is very depressing and very shocking is that you have two huge bags of pins down there"

The camera then cuts to a close up of Smith's open hand, in which are clearly visible a single blue pin and three pink ones (which again, is the inverse of the actual ratio of male to female suicides - of course, a smart-arse might say that she's holding pink ones in her hand because all the blue ones are in the board already, but that hardly addresses the optics the director of the programme is clearly going for).

At this point, the brief resurgence of the promise dies away altogether as in the next scene, we see Van Tulleken driving to Scotland as he asks:

"But there's one thing I'm still no clearer on - why is it that three times more men than women go on to die in this way when far more women than men attempt suicide?"

The answer to that is given by Professor Rory O'Connor, who basically points out that men are far more likely to choose more lethal methods of ending their own lives and are therefore more likely to die in this way.

Almost apologising for having an opinion that he knows may not be completely acceptable, O'Connor then says the last really noteworthy thing in the whole programme:

"Men - in general - and this is a generalisation! I appreciate that! - they invest a lot of their emotional support in their partner. Now if their partner leaves them, or for whatever reason the relationship breaks down, that man is potentially isolated and more likely to be emotionally isolated because men don't tend to have the broader network of emotional support that women have."

This occurs at literally the half-way mark of the programme and it's from this point on that the ostensible subject of the programme "Stopping Male Suicide" is abandoned completely.

From this point, right through to the end, there is no further mention of men in particular committing suicide, only on various strategies for suicide prevention and how likely to be effective they are.

Now I have no problem with this - women do commit suicide and I know of four such women of my own (not always close) acquaintance who have done this.

But honestly, is it not deeply insensitive, as well as counterproductive, to call a programme Stopping Male Suicide but then have that same programme heavily imply that this is just as much if not more of a problem for women at the halfway point, and then thereafter forget altogether that the programme was called Stopping Male Suicide?

Why call it that in the first place if they were more interested in the - admittedly valuable - topic of suicide prevention for all cases?

I'm willing to be proved wrong, but to my knowledge at least BBC programmes over the last decade or so focussed on domestic violence and sexual assault have focussed exclusively on women victims/survivors and male perpetrators/abusers and where no attempt has been made to suggest that these crimes may not exclusively afflict women.

I suppose, to be fair, the Horizon programme did only interview male subjects of attempted suicide or relatives of male suicides, but again if it turned out the real point of the programme was to investigate why anyone takes or might take their own life then why bother calling it Stopping Male Suicide?

This is especially true because the most promising aspects of the programme - if it really were interested in specifically male suicide - financial problems leading to loss of status, employment, home, access to children, self-esteem, etc. - were infuriatingly hinted at but not developed. In that sense, what it didn't have to say was overall more striking than what it did.

TL;DR Basically, a BBC programme called Stopping Male Suicide that I would say is worth watching but is a missed opportunity - it hinted at some important causes of male suicide but then seemed to pass over these in silence and move away from discussing issues of male suicide altogether and rather focus on suicidal risk on the part of anyone - a laudable aim in itself, but then why bother calling it Stopping Male Suicide