Male suicide rates in Wales highest in the UK

There is no coincidence that Blaenau Gwent has some of the worst poverty in Cymru and also one of the highest rates of male suicide. This issue with poverty has not gone away it still haunts our country. It will not be addressed by Westminster - it's time for independence.

Agree that poverty has a lot to do with it, but also think that young people often take on too many responsibilities too soon. Too many things are expected of men and women both materially and emotionally. Try to be a balanced and content adult before you start a family with all the burdens and bonuses that it brings. Social media should be avoided and comparison with others. Try to enjoy simple things in life like nature and helping people rather than just eating, alcohol or drug dependency.

Interesting that there is such thing as the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys. Amongst their other concerns are: The challenges faced by boys and men at all stages of education and work including attainment, re-training, stress, redundancy and unemployment The challenges faced by men as parents, particularly new fathers and separated fathers Boys with no positive male role models in their lives. I could add - in Wales - we took away coal and steel, and made farming low-profit. And look at the state of the WRU. Lot of this adds up

Anyone who has tried to access serious mental health support in Cymru knows why this is. We need to be honest that this is not just something the English do to us. It is our administrators who make government websites trumpeting our trauma-informed, patient first mental health system, but this stuff doesn't exist, is impossible to access, or exists only in tiny, trunkated versions. One time my GP and I went through the list of treatments advertised by our local NHS service and selected the one we thought I would benefit from and she made a referral. A few months(!) later I was copied a letter sent in return where they told us that this service is not offered and closed the referall. I still have that letter. Being in Cymru trying to access NHS mental health care is very hard. Not because of stigma, but because of a byzantine, labyrinthine system of assessment after assessment, each one months apart, each one trying to find someone to pass you on to, liable to toss you away to a short intervention with Mind as soon as possible. If you get offered some course, its a shorted version. 12 weeks for a course that is supposed to run for 2 years. 6 weeks for multi-month course, and now we're getting short interventions that are a single course long! There may be a fundamental misunderstanding of mental health problems in Cymru. The idea that there are people who are actively trying to kill themselves and everyone else is fine is completely wrong and leads to these high suicide rates. Lots of people don't intend to kill themselves, but their depression and mental health problems are ignored and tossed away, they're sent home with referrals for services that don't exist, put onto waiting lists that are six months to two years long. They feel hopeless and ignored and don't bother seeking further help. If they go to A&E they sit or stand in a bright room surrounded by injured people for twelve hours and sooner or later they think f* this and go home. It reinforces peoples' sense of being worthless or troublesome or unhelpable. Everyone involved, patients, staff, NHS managers, government, all know what is wrong and none of them fix it because they can't, or no-one is listening, or it is too expensive. So instead we pretend that services are available when they're not, we pretend we're listening and helping when we're passing the buck, we pretend a person is in treatment when they're on an eight month waiting list for a consultation that will lead nowhere. This is the real reason the Cymry are killing themselves in higher numbers than anywhere else.