Men are dying for want of a job
The costs of male unemployment are too great to be ignored, writes Mark Brooks
Did you see all that media coverage arising from the new unemployment figures, showing the number of men out of work had now topped a million for the first time in more than a decade?
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No, me neither.
Have you seen how closely the powers that be are focusing on the terrible impact that being out of work has on male mental health, and how unemployment is one of the key drivers of suicide among men – the most common cause of death, in fact, for men under fifty?
Scary, isn’t it?
More than eighty men take their own lives each week in England, three times the number of people killed on the country’s roads. Evidence from multiple sources shows unemployment is one of the key factors for male suicide, much more so than for women. Men are biologically programmed to provide for their families, as shown by research from leading academics, including Anna Machin from the University of Oxford. When they’re unable to do so, they can struggle very badly indeed. Employment is key to male identity and provides a sense of purpose and belonging which is as important as money, if not more so.
The evidence for the connection between unemployment and male suicide can be seen most starkly in the statistics arising from the crash of 2008, when middle-aged men in particular, who were the ones most likely to lose their jobs at that time, saw a marked increase in suicides.
The contrasting side of the mental health coin is shown when men move into work after being unemployed. Research from the University of Cambridge shows that even getting a part-time job can have a dramatic impact. The researchers found that men reported 30 per cent higher levels of life satisfaction when finding just eight hours of paid work per week.
Even if we close our eyes to the human cost, the damage to families of lives lost to suicide, the most hard-hearted would struggle to ignore the economic expense. Analysis by The Samaritans puts the cost of the suicide of a 30-year-old man at £1.7 million, with the overall cost to the UK economy of almost £10 billion.
The costs of male unemployment are too great to be ignored.
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Mark Brooks is Director of Policy and Communications at the Centre for Policy Research for Men and Boys.
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