Movember 2023: Men and Suicide
A quick update of the 2022 post
I’ve had a nasty cold/cough for several days now, so to keep this simple, I will be updating stats from last year’s post on the same subject.
But first….
2023 Movember Fundraiser
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 Movember itself
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:
Suicide age-adjusted death rate for men has been higher than prostate cancer’s for some years
Two things are going on to make this happen.
First is due to the huge decrease in prostate cancer mortality — huzzah to that! That’s fabulous news!
But it’s also due to the bad trend, since about 2000, of suicide death rates increasing for men.
And yes, it increased during the pandemic, too, but it just continued a trend that started 20 years ago.
I’m not going to do a detailed breakout in this post (the aforementioned illness of my own), but it’s mainly due to younger men dying by suicide more, and older men actually dying by suicide less. So this is a mixed bag of trends. This also has a relationship with what we will see with drug overdose trends, and I think meshes with the Movember Foundation’s goal of supporting men’s mental health.
The sex gap for suicide is much worse than for all-cause mortality
One can make a ratio between the age-adjusted death for males versus females, for all causes of death and for specific causes of death.
The ratio when it comes to suicide is hideous.
The “normal” mortality gap is that males have 40%-60% higher mortality than females, on an age-adjusted basis, for all causes of death put together.
When it comes to suicide, that gap is about 300%. This has persisted for decades.
The only reason this gap “improved” in recent decades, while suicide rates for men worsened, is that women’s suicide rates were getting worse faster. But we can see that turned around post-2016. Hmm.
Rather than talk about these ratios and rates, which I know can get confusing, let me show you the two trends on one graph:
Both male and female suicide rates have been rising for 20 years. There has been some moderation in female rates lately, checking growth, and keeping it under where it was in 1968 — but male rates have exceeded older rates long ago.
It’s been getting worse.
Let’s make it better.
