Highest rates of male suicide in a decade – what can be done?

Male suicide is at its highest rate in almost a decade. Although more women attempt suicide, the number of actual suicides amongst women is much smaller because in general women use less violent methods to kill themselves and therefore do not succeed as often.

So what might be going on – why are increasing numbers of men killing themselves?

We have just come out of what therapists sometimes refer to as “Crisismas”. Christmas and New Year is often a difficult time of year for many people and along with a rise in gym membership and a desire to lose weight and become healthier, a lot of people enter therapy.

In the past week I have been consulted by five new patients in my adult clinic, all of whom are struggling with family and relationship issues which have been exacerbated by the contradiction of what is suggested we should experience through the Christmas break, and what we actually experience with marital discord, family arguments, rejection, disappointment and a sense of crisis in despair.

Barristers I know suggest that January and February is their “peak season” with the highest number of their clients consulting them to begin the process of separation and divorce.

Are we in a double or triple dip recession? I am not sure anymore, but the economic recession has a direct impact on the weakest members of our society who are “closer to the edge”, so that unemployment, rising living costs and anxiety will impact on emotional wellbeing and mental health.

It is obvious that the very weakest members of our society our children, which is why Place2Be is so important. Children have no power and their situation in the recession with rising poverty and deprivation is invariably made worse.

However, as these dismal male suicide numbers suggest, there is another vulnerable group in our society. From a clinical and health perspective, to be born male is to be in a ‘high risk’ group. From birth to death, to be male is to be vulnerable. From the risks of miscarriage as a foetus to a wide range of special needs such as autism, to school exclusion, educational failure, alcohol dependency, substance misuse, suicide and early death, males outnumber females by three to one.

In suicide, men are three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

My own experience suggests that the way our society socialises and educates our children is a significant factor in why women seek help and men die when they are troubled or struggling with their lives. The familiar cliché about the British ‘stiff upper lip’ does not serve boys and men well since they often feel isolated and struggle to share their problems in the way that girls and women often do.

Boys often find it difficult to express emotions in words and suffer from alexithymia (without words for emotions). There are cultural expectations that to be male is to be powerful, self-reliant and competitive, and that vulnerability is shameful and weak. Indeed when I work with some male patients I do not ask them what they feel but rather what they think about something, thereby eliciting how they actually feel.

It is my belief and experience that if we are to address the mental health needs of adults, we need to start fostering emotional resilience when they are children. Emotional intelligence needs to be encouraged and made accessible to all children and Place2Be is highly successful in working with boys thorough counselling, Place2Talk and group work to address their feelings.  By encouraging boys to develop a respect for their emotional experience, we can to help them learn that sharing their troubles or feelings can lead to finding solutions or emotional relief. We need to encourage them to take their emotions seriously to take the stigma out of feeling troubled or worried.

From a clinical and health perspective, males are definitely the weaker and more vulnerable sex and we need to encourage boys and men to adopt the skills and emotional intelligence of girls and women. If we want to address adult male desperation and potential suicide, we need to educate boys from a young age to become emotionally intelligent and therefore emotionally resilient. If you are feeling worried stuck or desperate – tell someone – talk about it – share – find a way out.

Dr Stephen Adams-Langley,  Regional Manager at Place2Be has practiced as a psychotherapist and counsellor for 20 years, working with children, young people and adults.

I usually don’t cry when I look at the news

I usually don’t cry when I look at the news. There is of course enough to cry about. But for the most part, I just sigh.

But a few weeks before Christmas, I did cry. And I still do.

It was what happened in Newtown in Connecticut, USA. An appalling massacre of children and their teachers in a primary school. A whole class of 6 year olds in just a minute riddled with bullets for seemingly no reason at all.

I cried for their ravaged innocences. I cried too for their parents, so grief ridden and overwhelmed.

You might well ask, what was so different about this from the many other stories we see and hear of children in many parts of the world in one godforsaken war zone or another? Children are being slaughtered everywhere – physically and, if not killed, mentally. Yes, no difference at all.

But there was something about Newtown. This peaceful, charming suburban little place, so seemingly safe and protected in a country, however imperfect, reasonably law-abiding and not caught in the immediacy of war.

Out of nowhere came a solitary figure, a boy really (but legally a man), a boy of the town itself, who proceeded to kill his mother and mow down so many of those his mother worked with in the school.

It is beyond belief.

It is beyond understanding too. But, if nothing else, for me there is a desperate crying need for more understanding so that we can make sense of such madness and begin to think about how to prevent it from ever happening again.

This needless to say is a tall order. But I believe infinitely more important and relevant than rushing around tut tutting and demanding more controls of the licensing and usage of guns. Of course if there were fewer guns, the world would be an infinitely better place. But such are desires and terrors of men, they simply are not going to disappear.

The Guardian in its editorial focused solely on the gun control issue. However, in the midst of it, one sentence rang the most true for me. “Mad men with guns will always be a danger, whatever the gun laws.” Precisely. It is not the gun that fires itself. It is the human being who presses the trigger. If we look at all the mass killings that have occurred in recent years, it’s the distraught and turbulent minds of the human murderers that have propelled them into their crazed and merciless shootings.

I believe above all that this is a mental health issue and in particular a child and adolescent mental health issue. Look at the child histories of most of these mass killers and you will find misery, isolation and torment of one kind or another that has been unheeded. There are clues to be found in these histories to help us reach a better understanding. The general public endlessly ignores something that we in Place2Be know all too well from our practice – the impact of childhood emotional disturbance on later life.

The dreadful story of Newtown left me with a renewed and angry passion for more investment in child and adolescent mental health – at a time when in  many parts of this country, Child and Adolescent Mental Health services are being cut, waiting lists increased and staff morale critically undermined. We do need to be thankful that all of us who are responsible for the development of Place2Be have been so successful in maintaining and growing our invaluable service.

It is premature for me to have an informed opinion of the Newtown boy. I do not have the facts of his life or his mental state. However, in my imagination, drawn from many years experience in the field, I have a picture of a small child, isolated, friendless, unhappy and somehow overlooked at school. I like to think that a child like this, were he to be in one of our Place2Be schools, would be spotted early on and helped by the school and us and so be prevented from entering a comparable and tragic path in his life.

Peter Wilson, Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Clinical Adviser
Place2Be

How important are male role models for troubled boys?

When I’m working in schools, I sometimes hear parents, school staff or other professionals say that a troubled child (especially a boy) may have lacked a ‘male role model’ in their young lives.

The assumption seems to be that there’s something about the positive experience of a father’s presence that’s especially effective in establishing boundaries for a child. Without this, the argument runs, the child may struggle to accept the authority of adults and behave inappropriately with other children.

Sometimes in deciding on a therapist for an unhappy child, the manager of a therapy service might ask a similar question. So, when a boy lacking a father comes for therapy to Place2Be, is it better for us to offer him a male therapist? Through the therapist, will the boy establish a safe attachment to a man who he can trust – and thereby develop an understanding of boundaries, of what’s right and wrong, and what is appropriate behaviour? It’s as if we’re saying that a male therapist might provide the boy with a father figure he hasn’t had.

On the other side of the question, some therapists say that it’s the ability to form a bond with the child, to listen carefully, and to understand the child’s world that is the most significant thing in the counselling room. And this is true regardless of whether they are a man or a woman. The quality of the relationship counts above all.

In the actual practice of therapy, it’s rarely useful to start from such broad generalisations. A focus on the individual child and their unique experience is what a therapist needs to begin with in order to bring understanding and compassion to the work. Every case needs looking at individually. This is why Place2Be’s detailed assessment of every child referred to the service is crucial. As part of this, our trained staff ask questions of teachers, parents and the child him- or herself and form as complete a view as possible of the child’s world and their level of distress.

In doing this, we try to bring as open a mind as possible and not to jump to conclusions about the ‘problem’ and its ‘solution’. If we can achieve this, what emerges is usually a very complex and multi-layered picture that can rarely be reduced to a question of ‘absent parent’ or ‘missing role model’. As therapists we often work with inner worlds – ones that are populated by the images of men and women that a child has absorbed through diverse experiences. Such images are not always easy to predict from actual family arrangements, leading us to be cautious about the supposed negative effects of an absent parent.

Fundamentally, at Place2Be we try always to remember that children are naturally resilient. It’s usually only when multiple factors start to wear away at a child’s inner strengths (for example, sustained material deprivation, abuse, neglect, domestic violence) that a child might start to show distress. In such cases, missing parents – be they male or female – will only ever be part of the ‘problem’. And I think it follows that the gender of the therapist working with the child might only ever be part of an ‘answer’ to that problem – an ‘answer’ that we should remain open to, but also approach cautiously. It’s invariably a mistake for a therapist to enter the therapy room thinking that they know better than the child himself (or herself) what journey the therapy will take them on.

Keith Harvey
Regional Manager
Place2Be

Starting school

With the beginning of the school year coming round apparently so soon after the last one, it is hard to keep in mind the individual challenges starting school presents to each child.

Despite a great transition programme from pre-school last term, and a slow start of half days, my grandson was still saying “This is not going to happen” each time his mother cheerily and enthusiastically told everyone “..and he is off to BIG school on Monday”. His strategy was to wear his camouflage backpack and then find a bush to hide in so no-one could find him. In the event, he spent his first morning playing with Star Wars Lego, and couldn’t wait to get back.

For some children it is more complicated. One parent known to Place2Be, with a child already at the school, “forgot” to collect her child after these introductory half-days, despite phone calls. Finally, his older sister simply brought him home at the end of the day. His mum was young and on her own. She thought of the school as more of a parent than she was – so why wouldn’t they give him breakfast, and keep him all day, and make everything all right?

The child was completely bewildered. No-one at home had explained this momentous event to him very well. He was suddenly faced with hundreds of strangers, most of them bigger than him, his sister was nowhere to be found, and he’d just seen his mum walk off. He already lived in a world where relationships were precarious and unpredictable. Now here was a far bigger, more precarious pool for him to flail about in.

In these early days of teachers and children getting to know each other, it can help that an agency like Place2Be can offer a safe haven for some of these more distressed children. This little boy came and sat in the Place2be room for a short time in the morning, chatting and playing with the toys as a kind of acclimatisation, before joining his class. We also met with his mother, explaining to her what he might be feeling on his first days at school. In this way we modelled how she might talk to him about it all.

Everyone needs preparation for these big events – preparation to be a teacher, to be a parent, to be a primary school child. Without preparation, without the fantasy of the camouflage backpack to express our fears, and without anyone there to listen to those fears, how could the first day of anything not be bewildering? And worse, how could it not define a child’s early relationship to school, if all that were missing?

Jonathan Wood
National Manager for Scotland for Place2Be

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Confronting triumph and disaster

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters as the same…”
(Rudyard Kipling)

Riveted by the Olympics and the triumph of so many of our British athletes I believe we have all shared the joy of the winners whether their prize has been  gold, silver or bronze. We have felt the pain and endurance, the determination and courage of those participating and the disappointment of those that did not win.  For me all the competitors are winners; their stories, their triumphs and their disasters have not deterred them from taking part. Their pain was visible, their joy contagious and their disappointment tear-jerking as was their success.

How many of the winners thanked those who supported them, who never lost faith in their determination, who lived with their doubts and their fears and yet did not fail them.

My mind then turned to many of the children in our schools who have little faith, little aspiration and little opportunity to even dare to dream of potential triumphs. They do not have an adult in their world with their own courage and determination to support them in their dreams. Not because they did not have dreams themselves but because they could not trust those dreams when all others doubted them.

We hear about how the Olympics might leave a lasting legacy. Children are thinking about taking up their bikes, their javelins, swimming, running and jumping hurdles and playing hockey and volleyball.

Ensuring that the 2012 Olympics leave a lasting legacy will take much more than support from The Big Lottery and the government. It requires the unwavering commitment of many thousands of individuals, on the ground, in every family, school and youth club, who will be there day and day out, to nurture dreams and foster self-belief, so that children’s fragile aspirations gain strength and longevity.

As a society we need to be there to support those who cannot dream because life has worn them down so much that they have no confidence in themselves, let alone their ability to parent their children.

So one year on from the riots we have a different story on the front pages of our newspapers. As we celebrate records being broken and triumphs being rejoiced, let us remember what happens when young people do not have hope.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minutes
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it…” (Rudyard Kipling)

Let us all be there to support our nation’s children, to help them transform their dreams into reality and celebrate their achievements. They are not 100% our population, but they are 100% of our future.

Benita Refson OBE
Chief Executive
Place2Be

 

Mentally healthy and achieving academically

Place2Be welcomes the Government’s concerted effort to ensure that their Mental Health Strategy is backed up by an implementation framework that raises the status of schools as an agency to improve the mental health of children and young people in England.

This is particularly important at a time when the emotional wellbeing of children in schools is at risk of being overridden by the pressures of exams and the singular attention on attainment.

What the implementation framework does masterfully is link good mental health with better educational achievement, a link that underpins the rationale for our work in schools. Last year, according to teachers working with us in schools, 79% of the pupils we worked with improved psychologically.

This is what we would have hoped for, but what is equally encouraging is that nearly 60% of these children were also more able to concentrate in class and 64% were less of a burden in the classroom from a behavioural perspective.

We also conducted a sample analysis of 69 primary school pupils who received one-to-one counselling from us and found that 66% demonstrated above expected progress in maths, 73% in writing and 81% in reading.

Now that we have a framework to build on the bold aspirations of the Mental Health Strategy, it is vital that the Government turns words into actions and makes mental health support for children and young people a priority; this will lay the foundations to building mentally healthy and academically achieving future generations.

Mick Atkinson
Place2Be, Head of Commissioning and Research

There’s no such thing as a perfect parent

The most important lesson I have learnt is that there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. I had been running around, trying so hard to be a ‘perfect’ parent to my three children (who are all aged under five) and feeling I was failing, so it came as such a relief when I learnt this on the Place2Be ‘Being a Parent’ course. The course made me realise that I was not spending any special time with my children or sharing how I felt with them. I was given support around how my children and I could share our feelings, and this started with us putting faces on the fridge to express how we felt. We learnt a lot about each other.

I have learnt how to use descriptive praise to encourage my children’s good behaviour. When I praise them they repeat their good behaviour, and I can see that it makes them feel very happy and confident.

My children and I now play non-directive games – we switch roles and they become the boss. In this role they make more careful decisions as the responsible ones, and I can see they are happy and enjoying themselves. And I enjoy myself too.

My children and I have also created a star chart. We sat at the table together and wrote six main rules for all of us. They drew some pictures by the rules and we stuck the chart on the wall. Every night, before we go to bed, we go through the rules and each of the children can put stickers against the rules that they have obeyed during the day. The rules included things such as “no shouting”, “share your toys”, “eat you meal” and “listen to mummy”.

As a mum I am sure that the more we can support our children’s creativity, development and motivation, the more they will be able to be active and social, and a happy member of their community.