Male suicide rates are so high because of the poor “emotional education” provided to young men, a campaigning MP has warned.
Labour’s Madeleine Moon called for improvements in men’s emotional education and an end to the expectation that men should “man up” when faced with problems.
“The emotional education that we give to young men in this country is very poor,” she said during a debate on International Men’s Day and male suicide.
“No matter how modern a society we have become and how diverse a society we have become, we still seem to educate our children in a feeling that they have to ‘man up’ – that they have to be strong, that they can’t talk about emotions.”
Luciana Berger, the shadow minister for mental health who has campaigned against spending cuts, said Britain needed a “revolution” in its approach to suicide prevention, given that the number of cases was rising.
There are 6,000 suicides every year in the UK, three-quarters of them men. Suicide is the most common cause of death for men under the age of 35.
