Male Suicide

Debate between Danielle Rowley and Jackie Doyle-Price

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jackie Doyle-Price)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I thank the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) for the powerful and moving way in which he addressed this important subject. He said that this is his first Westminster Hall debate; I am sure that it will be the first of many. I encourage him to continue to look at this subject, because it is clear from the passion with which he articulated his argument that he cares deeply about it. I will always welcome hearing any representations from him.

The hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out that suicide is the biggest killer of men between the ages of 25 and 49. Any death by suicide is an avoidable death. We should always be vigilant and do what we can to tackle suicide and self-harm. There is a gender difference because suicide affects men more and women tend to self-harm more, but the motivation is the same. We should look at the same tools in order to curb them.

Every death by suicide is a tragedy. As the Minister responsible for mental health, I hear from families bereaved by suicide about the devastating impact that it has on them and on the wider community. All of us in this House will have been touched by suicide in one way or another, whether directly and personally or through the experience of constituents. It feels like society has failed those people. That is why I am determined to drive forward the action we are taking at a national level and in local communities to reduce suicides. Generally, paying greater attention to mental health will make a great deal of difference, particularly on the issues that the hon. Gentleman raised: encouraging people to be willing to talk and encouraging everyone around them to know when somebody might need help.

[Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) said, the majority of people who have committed suicide never reached professional help or went to a health professional. Does the Minister agree that preventive training needs to be rolled out to people such as landlords, firemen and taxi drivers with whom people with suicidal feelings might have contact, even if they do not reach out?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

In a nutshell, we all need to become much more aware about when people might show signs of mental ill health. I hope that through the programmes that we are running, the priority that we are putting on mental health will do much to raise awareness.

Obviously, we are trying to do much more in schools, following the publication of “Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper”, but the category of people that the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West referred to miss all that attention. Working-class men who work on building sites are not “meant” to have mental health problems, so when they have them, nobody pays any attention, because the environment is very masculine. The hon. Gentleman identified that. They are certainly not going to seek help, so it is not surprising that that particular group of people has a very high incidence of suicide. There is a general role for public awareness.

The point that the hon. Member for Midlothian (Danielle Rowley) made about bars is a very interesting one. We are keen to use mainstream media to highlight the message. One of the reasons that we support Time to Change, which the hon. Gentleman referred to, is exactly that—to get out those populist messages to raise awareness among the whole general public, so that we can all identify when someone is in trouble.