Why do men die by suicide? with Dr Susie Bennett

Welcome to episode 198 with Dr Susie Bennett, a psychologist and research fellow at the 'Suicidal Behaviour Research Lab' at the University of Glasgow.

Her work focuses on trying to understand why men are more at risk of suicide and what can be done to help more men access a dignified and meaningful life.

Through this work, Susie has been involved in reviewing two decades of research on male suicide, joining forces with 242 people impacted by male suicide to create an agenda of research priorities for male suicide and asking men who have been suicidal in the past week or year to tell her about the barriers they experience around accessing professional support.

In this episode I chat to Susie about why she got involved in researching such a specific topic and how the work has impacted how she sees the world.

We chat about some of the outcomes from her research and get in to things like the cultural norms of masculinity, gender bias and psychological pain and we chat about emotions, relationships and success and how they impact men specifically.

We also chat about how to move past awareness and just telling men to talk and what needs to change if we want to change the heartbreaking statistics around male suicide.

Susie’s work is fascinating and vital.  It was an absolute pleasure to explore it with her.

This episode is a big one, we cover important things and things that are tricky to talk about but these are the conversations that we need to having and I hope you get a lot out of listening.

On Susie’s website, http://malesuicideresearch.com you can access all of the studies we talk about in this episode as well as all sorts of interesting reports and talks.  Her socials are amazing too @male_suicide_research.

You can connect with me on social media @propermentalpodcast or via www.propermentalpodcast.com.

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Thanks for listening!