Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 49 in the UK.
We know that now, after the deaths of a string of high profile men in the last few years – The Prodigy’s Keith Flint, music producer Avicii, and most recently, Love Island’s Mike Thalassitis, who died by suicide last month, aged 26.
But when Billy*, the ex-boyfriend I had split up with a year before, died in 2013, I had no idea. I had no idea that male suicide was such a huge problem, affecting so many, so profoundly.
In the immediate aftermath of his death we – the friends of his I had stayed tentatively close to and I – didn’t know how it had happened. He rode a motorbike, so we thought that maybe he’d been in an accident. As the news spread – that he had died by suicide, just miles outside the city we’d moved to together eighteen months before – the reality of how he died weighed less heavily than that of his death itself. As I started to comprehend his suicide, there were even more questions.
My relationship with Billy had been tempestuous and when we broke up – a short, sharp shock that was the culmination of a year’s worth of desperate fighting – I always thought we would one day get back together. But we hadn’t spoken the year since we’d broken up.
When someone dies by suicide, I can see how easily people go looking for someone to blame. In an attempt to carve out some answers to the myriad of questions piling up in the aftermath of his death, finding someone to point the finger at can help ease some of that turmoil. But, given that Billy and I hadn’t spoken in a year, it still came as a shock when I found myself unexpectedly in the firing line.
It was made clear to me that his family didn't want me at the funeral, despite our distance over the past year. I slipped away from some of the friends I relied on to feel close to him, knowing they’d felt torn about their loyalties. Being denied my chance to mourn him with others who loved him meant grieving was a solitary process, and I’ve marked the anniversaries of his death alone ever since.
The most painful part was the feeling that in the period of time that I hadn’t spoken to him, I had become irrelevant. That I was unimportant in life, and therefore also in death.
But equally, it felt like the opposite was true. At first I took some comfort in his family’s blame, and in blaming myself. In the absence of answers and closure, I wore my grief like a badge of honour and told myself this great, lofty tale of Shakespearean proportions where tragedy was the only outcome
Ultimately I don’t believe I was responsible for my ex’s suicide. I do believe that the intensity of our relationship, the impossibility of our move across the country at such a young age and the pain we both experienced after the inevitable messy demise led to a chain of events that neither I, nor he, had much control over.
It’s coming up to five years since Billy’s suicide, and in that time learning, listening and connecting with other people who have had similar experiences has provided the comfort and solidarity I couldn’t find elsewhere. I know now that at the heart of his death was the inability to speak out and ask for help – the destructive conditioning that tells men and boys ‘being silent’ is ‘being strong’.
With every high profile male suicide the nation becomes more clued up on the shocking statistics. In 2017, 75% of the 6,213 suicides recorded in the UK and the Republic of Ireland were men. Jane Powell set up CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, when public knowledge of the figures was woefully low.
“When Alexander McQueen took his life [in 2010] this was simply put down to him being artistic, and his mum dying,” she says. “When Gary Speed [the footballer] took his life [in 2011] real questions got asked. CALM has consistently linked the high suicide rate in men with notions of masculinity, and it feels like this message is finally taking hold.”
Male suicide is now national health concern and it’s long, long overdue.
But now that the narratives surrounding male suicide have changed from reductive and ridiculing to sympathetic and supportive, other more sinister ones have emerged. There are actually newly established guidelines in place on how suicide should be reported – we must avoid graphic descriptions of methods, and glamourisation of mental health issues. We must aim for ‘sensitive, non-sensationalising coverage’.
In the quest for salaciousness within such strictly governed parameters, the narrative in the tabloid press has followed a predictably blame-centric trajectory. After Love Island’s production values and aftercare (or supposed lack of it), the finger of blame for Mike Thalassitis’ suicide was quickly pointed at his ex girlfriend, Megan McKenna – her silence, after the news broke; and then, of course, the struggle that Mike faced after they broke up, and the therapy he had to have to ‘get over’ her. That “she was the first person [he] had ever loved.”
“He openly admitted that he had really fallen for her,” said Mike’s manager in an interview with The Sun. “She was his first proper girlfriend and, although he'd dated other people in the past, it was the first time he'd fallen in love.”
Never mind that Megan had broken down on Celebs Go Dating just weeks before over Mike, mourning her own loss of the man she “really fell for”. Or that Megan had filed police reports against him back in December and was forced to temporarily move out of her home after he reportedly broke in a took naked photographs of her, threatening to leak them to the press.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen it, either. When Mac Miller died of a drug overdose in 2018 following a history of mental health and substance abuse issues (the coroner’s report characterised his death as accidental) , his ex-girlfriend Ariana Grande’s social media channels were blasted with such vehement hatred that she was forced to disable the comments function. Far from being merely implicated in his death she was directly accused of murder, of not caring or ever loving him.
Eventually she released a brave and poignant statement.
“I am not a babysitter or a mother and no woman should feel that they need to be,” she said. “I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety and prayed for his balance for years.”
In cases of suicide there is apparently only one victim, even if the relationship preceding it had been painful and destructive for both parties. Mothers, sisters and wives often intuitively take on the responsibility of ‘fixing’ existing mental health problems, even those they want to help resistant, and then face crippling guilt for having ‘failed’ them in the wake of suicide. In cases where romantic love is seen to have been a factor, ‘dying of a broken heart’ is a convenient, media-friendly trope that dismisses the complexity of deadly mental health conditions