Australia's failed suicide policies

These women making policy are not villains. But their lived experience is not the lived experience of a middle-aged man who has just lost his children in the family court, lost his house, lost his income, and is sleeping in his car. Programs shaped by female survivors look like what we have now: talking about feelings, reducing stigma, building emotional connection. Programs shaped by his experience would look entirely different - emergency housing, legal advocacy, financial crisis intervention. Those programs don't exist, because the people who would demand them aren't in the room.

The peak body for this lived experience movement is Roses in the Ocean, federally funded and female-dominated, now effectively setting the national agenda for suicide prevention. Their definition of lived experience - "having experienced suicidal thoughts, survived a suicide attempt, supported a loved one, or been bereaved by suicide" - is broad enough to include almost anyone touched by suicide who is still with us. But men who survive an attempt would usually prefer not to be known as someone who tried. The result is an organisation dominated by females setting the agenda for a crisis killing mostly men.

The largest direct service program is the Way Back Support Service, receiving over $150 million. Way Back supports suicide attempt survivors. Sixty percent of its clients are women. Three quarters of suicide deaths are men. Nobody in the policy system finds this worth remarking on.

The sector's party line is that women attempt suicide more often than men, making them equally deserving of resources. This sounds reasonable until you look at what those attempts actually represent. Psychiatric literature is clear that a significant proportion of female suicide attempts are parasuicidal gestures - cries for help that are not fatal by design. That is not a dismissal of their distress, which is real and deserves support. But a parasuicidal gesture and a completed suicide are not the same thing, and they cannot be weighted equally when setting policy priorities. Designing a suicide prevention system around attempt rates rather than death rates is not a neutral technical choice - it is a decision to prioritise the group that survives over the group that dies.

And how did this system design itself? The health department asked the sector what was needed. The sector - peer workers, lived experience advocates, healthy masculinity evangelists - answered. Naturally they recommended more lived experience, more healthy masculinities, more of everything that had already failed to move the dial. Australia's suicide policies are failing. From 2000 to 2021 Australia's suicide rate fell by just 1%, while the global average declined by 36%.

Yet the people running the system have decided this means more of the same is needed - and with the feminist capture of May 2026 now complete, the healthy masculinities agenda is no longer lurking in the background. It is front and centre.

The department currently running this show is the Health Department - and that is another part of the problem. Not only is the department overwhelmingly female at the policy level, but housing suicide prevention inside Health guarantees the entire focus remains on mental illness and emotional distress rather than the situational drivers - family breakdown, financial ruin, legal crisis - that the evidence identifies as significant primary precipitants of male suicide. Australia's previous National Suicide Prevention Adviser Christine Morgan recognised this in her 2021 final report, identifying the disproportionate impact of suicide on men as an issue that "must be called out as a priority for whole-of-government action" – which means getting it out of the Health Department. That advice was ignored. Suicide prevention remained in the hands of the Mental Health mafia, and the men kept dying.

What the money doesn't buy

What does this feminist capture mean for the organisations currently scrambling for funding to help suicidal men? Most of them are already in the wrong business - encouraging men to seek help, which in practice means the poor bloke ends up suffering through a female psych exploring his feelings. Helpful, perhaps. But not for the man whose problem is he hasn't seen his kids in six months. Or has been thrown out of his house and has nowhere to live.

For that man, a psychologist's office is not the answer. He doesn't need his feelings validated. He needs someone who understands what is actually happening to him and can help him navigate it. The organisations that do this are few, small, and chronically underfunded. Dads in Distress is the most significant - peer support groups and help lines run by men who have been through the family breakdown system themselves, who understand the specific devastation of losing your children, and who don't pathologise the men who walk through the door. And Men's Sheds, which tackles the major problem driving elderly men to suicide - loneliness - by offering regular companionship built around the simple but powerful act of making things together.

These programs share a quality that the funded sector seems almost allergic to: they meet men where they are, take seriously what men say is wrong, and don't begin from the assumption that the man is the problem. In a policy landscape dominated by toxic masculinities evangelists and lived experience bureaucrats, that makes them radical. It also makes them, for the men who find them, lifesaving.

The men dying by suicide in Australia are not dying because they haven't learned to cry. They are mainly dying because they've lost their children, their homes, their reason to keep going - and the system built to save them is too busy advancing gender equity to notice. Seven men today. Seven tomorrow. The feminist capture of suicide prevention is not an abstraction. It is a body count.

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