S is also for Suicide

(Updated November 1^st, 2005)

If you are moderately familiar with the topic at hand, which is the treatment of men by our society, you probably have wondered how men can survive the crushing depression that they must feel while struggling with a strongly biased legal system that is eager to enslave them.

Well, many of men don’t survive it.

Suicide rates for men and boys are already much higher than those for women and girls – with 75% of all suicides being committed by men - over 22,000 men per year. (The rate is 80% in Canada, perhaps reflecting their system, which is often even more abusive of men. )

And suicide rates for divorced men are even higher than that - divorced and separated men are TWICE AS LIKELY to commit suicide as other men, per the study "Marital Status and Suicide in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study" by Augustine J. Kposowa, Ph.D., at the University of California at Riverside. CBS News covered the report here.

The study showed that being single versus being married made no difference in suicide rates.
- Simply 'being married' does not provide singificant mental health benefits relating to suicide.

Even more tellingly, for women marital status, married, single, separated or divorced, made NO STATISTICAL DIFFERENCE in suicide rates.
- So somehow, divorce affects men in a much more significant way than women. One wonders what that way could be...

Previous to this study, increased rates of suicide for men had been explained away by claiming that significant mental and physical health benefits were to be had from married life, and by 'congitive differences' between men and women - women purportedly spending more time 'processing' their problems and thinking more 'inclusively' than men, Well Dr. Kposowa's research has exposed that canard, (wait, let me speak plainly:) that misandrous, shovenist tripe for what it is.

Let's take a moment and really reveiw those numbers, which we will extrapolate using the published rough perecentages in the CBS news article:

Total Suicides: 30,000 per year
Men's Suicides: 22,500 per year
Women's Suicides: 7,500 per year
Divorced/Separated Men's Suicides: 14,850 per year.

Hmm. I wonder how many men committed suicide outside of a divorce/separation situation. Well, I know how to subtract, lets see...

Non Divorced/Separated Men's Suicides: 7,650 per year.
Approximately equal to the number for women.

So it seems reasonable to guess, that if it were not for the way men are treated in divorce, those 14,850 men PER YEAR would still be alive.

Dr. Kposowa's study; the first study that cared enough about men to look at the details of why men kill themselves; shows us that if you hear about a man committing sucide the odds are better than 2:1 that he is either a divorcee or going through a divorce.

Suicide is a dramatic and extreme way out of a very bad situation. -A way out that few would choose.

The significant increase (2:1) in suicides following a divorce for men is very significant.

These men are the canaries in the coal-mine of our family court system. They are literally dying to tell us something, and apparently that something is about... Divorce.

SO NOW COMES THE BIG QUESTION:

What is so terrible about divorce that men would kill themselves to escape it?

The answer is simple: Slavery. To quote Adrian Banks' article on suicide and divorce:

So what is the main cause of [divorced male] suicide? […] The answer to this question is not that difficult, but before someone can accept the truth of the main causes of suicide, one must first accept the truth that slavery is just as much an institution today as it has been throughout history. The more oppressive and cruel the enslavement, the more suicides there will be among the enslaved classes of society. Why do you think that, in pre civil war times, slaves were kept in the holes of ships and not allowed on the decks? Simple, it kept the slave trader's precious cargo of labor from jumping into the ocean. As Winston Churchill stated during World War II, "it is better to perish that to live as slaves." […] In a divorce situation today, there need not be any legitimate grounds thanks to no fault divorce. A man can be a hard working fellow who supports his family and loves his children, but if his wife decides to divorce him, there is nothing he can do.

Kposowa cites "financial obligations," in explaining the preponderance of divorcees amongst male suicides noting that "The courts in the United States are in a position now whereby money is given to the woman, or the man is forced to pay alimony, child support. The man is also asked, in some [perhaps most] cases, to vacate the house."

Kposowa also notes: "If a man loses custody of the children and the woman keeps those children, there are situations whereby she may not allow the man to see the children, and that causes some depression." -No kidding.

Suicidal divorced men are merely slaves leaping from the decks
– consider the facts:

• Most marriages end in divorce – over 60% by my numbers.
• 66% of these are initiated by the wife and few of them for abuse or any real fault. -No-fault divorces are initiated by women three times as often as by men.
• The courts award physical custody to the man about 3% of the time – the odds are 40 to 1 against the man winning physical custody.
• Truly shared custody is so rare that the courts don’t even know how to calculate support for it – their spreadsheets don’t support it. They have to fill out one for the father as primary, and one for the mother, and then average the two. - I believe that loss of access to one’s children and alienation are key factors in male suicide.
• Women commonly interfere with the visitation rights of the ex husband. 75% of men complain of this behavior, and 40% of women admit it. If one assumes complaints are lower than the actual number of abuses, the numbers must be staggering.
• Add the loss of the vast majority of the marital assets and the house, and everything that the man has worked for, financial contributions being where men are expected to excel, and what they are supposed to judge themselves by, and you have taken away a lot of the reasons that men have to live.
• Add alimony and child support, all while not being allowed to co-parent your own children.
• Add to all this the fact that the state’s machinery grinds very finely – loss of a job, ‘underemployment’, and bankruptcy are good enough reasons to lose almost any debt, but not alimony and child support, no, these continue unabated, plus penalties and legal fees.
• And if our poor man is unlucky enough to lose his job, or become ‘underemployed’, then the legal system in many of our states, including NJ, will take 60-65% of his income, even unemployment, irregardless of what his spouse is earning. Imagine, a spouse with a $150,000 salary, collecting 65% of the income of a man scratching by on $405 per week unemployment, or a $40,000/year job. NJ would do it in a heartbeat. I bet they already have.

So divorced men have good reason to be casting themselves from the decks.

Having lost their wives, their children, their assets, and finally their ability to earn a living, and being relegated to permanent poverty, divorced men are killing themselves in record numbers - over 15,000 men per year, killed by divorce.

Our job is to support them, and encourage our government to notice, and care.

-M

See The State of Fatherhood for more information... If you feel suicidal, the divorce info page on suicide might be a good place to look.
I also recommend looking at Swallowed by a Snake.