2025 Movember: Men and Suicide

Pick up the phone, it's hard out there for all of us

Nov 27, 2025

I thank subscriber BRetty for sharing the link to this post by Cdr Salamander:

I mentioned this on the paid-subscriber-only UNCLAS Read Board Podcast earlier this week, but I wanted to bring it up for everyone in a different kind of FbF…

21 days ago · 98 likes · 38 comments · CDR Salamander

I’m grabbing the letter from the post:

988 Lifeline [that’s a link]

I have a separate message, though. While it’s great to “just pick up”, I want people to understand there is a limit to what we can do and what we can control.

Do what you can when you can… but know that sometimes things are beyond what you can do anything about. This message is about those who feel guilty: “…if I only just….”

Do the best you can. That’s all one can expect.

The above is about veterans’ risk for suicide, which I wrote about on Veterans’ Day.

Movember 2025: Veterans and Suicide

Mary Pat Campbell

Nov 11

Read full story

It’s not just veterans. Men in general have a heightened risk for suicide. I’ll look at the stats below. But first… Movember!

Movember 2025 Fundraising

Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:

Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at the Movember site
My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you

And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:

While prostate cancer was my initial impetus for supporting Movember, I support all of Movember’s causes, which includes men’s mental health and suicide prevention.

I read the news today, oh boy

Alas, I see pieces like this quite often.

11 Nov 2025, MSN: Dallas Cowboys’ Marshawn Kneeland sent ‘concerning’ text messages prior to his death

Shortly before Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died by suicide, the player said goodbye to friends and said he couldn’t bear to do any time behind bars, police recordings revealed on Tuesday.
The Cowboys head of security, Cable Johnson, was put through to police in Plano asking for officers in that Dallas suburb to do a welfare check on the 24-year-old.
“He sent out some group texts that are concerning, probably mental health,” Johnson told a police dispatcher. “The group text seemed to be saying goodbye and he made some statement about not being able to go to prison or to jail.”
It wasn’t clear what Kneeland could have been referencing about possible time behind bars.
….
Kneeland was found dead in the early morning hours of Thursday last week with a self-inflicted gunshot wound after evading authorities, crashing a car and fleeing on foot, police said.

Recently, I’ve gotten many news stories about young men and suicide.

In the case of Marshawn Kneeland, he was in pro football, so one can understand media coverage, but I was not pleased to see other young men’s deaths highlighted in media. I will not link the stories.

I’ve had to argue with many people about this, and many aren’t happy to learn about the actual pattern of men’s suicide rates in the U.S.

It’s not the highest for young men.

The trend in suicide death rates for men by age, 1968-2024

Here is the big picture, in graphical form.

There are lots of data lines here, but you can see the oldest age groups have the highest death rates by suicide (this is not the same pattern for females, by the way.)

I am showing down only to ages 25-34 years old, but fyi, the younger age groups have even lower death rates. There are reasons why, and yes, if teens and children die by suicide, it’s news. Because it’s really infrequent. I’ve had to explain it before: when old people die of the usual, they don’t report it, now do they?

But did you know that suicide death rates were highest for old men?

Interestingly, the “early seniorhood” has lower suicide death rates — the early years of retirement, most men have relatively good health, and maybe doing fairly well.

But as they get old…

But if we look at younger men:

Something to note: there used to be far more differences among working-age men in suicide death rates. Not so much anymore.

A different way to look at the changes in rates over time is to take a snapshot:

In some cases, there are improvements in the rates, but the general situation of elderly men having higher death rates by suicide… this has concerned me for a long time.