Bottom line is that men have a lot of problems and stress in their lives but there is no real effort to help them.
Jim
Indeed. Men and boys face enormous problems, and society looks the other way. Suicide, secondary school drop out rates, illiteracy, homelessness, college enrollment, male-only-draft, family court, reproductive freedom, incarceration rates, work place fatalities, funding for health care, violent victimizations, the justice system, longevity, drug abuse, domestic violence, discriminatory laws, incarceration rates, and the list goes on.
I used to track the (lack of) focus about men by my employer. In my organizations weekly newspaper, from 1995 to 2005, there were 479 articles specific to women or women's issues, compared to 6 articles specific to men or men's issues. In its online version, the ratio was 378 to 6. In the same online version, from 1996 to 1999, the word "woman" or "women" appeared 256 times. The word "man" or "men" appeared 17 times (and 12 of these were in the phrase "men and women" or "women and men"). My employer announced and funded a "Women's Health Initiative." It was announced during men's health awareness week (bonus points to anyone who can tell me when men's health awareness week is - heck, bonus points to anyone who even knows that there is a men's health awareness week). I have a long list of these things.
Point is. My employer is no different than society as a whole. While there are many factors contributing to the disproportionate number of men who commit suicide, the bottom line is that society doesn't care.
It's why there are 5 government-funded offices on women's health, but 0 offices on men's health. Bipartisan legislation to establish an office of men's health has always failed.
According to society, we need to focus our attention on women and girls because men are 4 times more likely to commit suicide; men are 90-95% more likely to die in workplace accidents; men live 6-7 years less than women; funding for prostate cancer research is 20% that of breast cancer research even though both are about as deadly; men receive harsher sentences for similar crimes (e.g., men who murder are 10 times more likely to receive the death penalty than women who murder); boys are now about 40% of college students (even though demographically there are more boys of college age than girls); men are 2.5 times more likely to be victims of violent crime (but we have a multi-billion dollar "Violence Against Women's Act"); boys/men dominate in homelessness, drug addiction, and illiteracy; 99.98% of the 55,000 American soldiers who died in Vietnam were men, but we have a dedicated women's memorial honoring the "special sacrifice" made by women; and so on.
That is why men are more likely to commit suicide than women. Society doesn't care about men.
But I'm optimistic. Perhaps Obama's newly established "White House Council on Women and Girls" will rectify some of these problems. Maybe the new administration can get the percentage of male college students down to 25%-30% where it belongs.
