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      Today’s the Day

      These numbers are the aggregate of thousands upon thousands of unique untold stories, of men who didn’t make it.

      “Today’s the day I’m going to kill myself,” said David Durston. “You wake up and think, yeah, I’ll kill myself today. It’s today.”

      The walls around him are painted cheerful primary colours. The Solace Centre for adults with mental illness, a low-slung bungalow in Ealing, West London, is a sanctuary for those with troubled minds – troubled in the mind-filling, heart-emptying, all-encompassing way that can lead people, like David, to wake up feeling like this day could be their last.

      Every year the UK’s Office for National Statistics releases a document detailing all deaths registered in the preceding year. It is one side of a great national ledger, accounting for and categorising the eventual fates of, in the case of the available statistics for 2013, the half a million people who died in England and Wales.

      There are many ways to go. There are big-ticket items, like “neoplasms” — growths, mostly cancer (145,344 deaths), and circulatory diseases, such as heart disease (140,301). There are throwback killers like tuberculosis (301), and niche afflictions like avian or swine flu (21). The bleak catalogue includes ailments one wouldn’t know caused death, like hernias (976), and conditions that used to kill many more, like pregnancy and childbirth (47).

      It spans from infections that assail the body from the outside, to those ailments that unexpectedly emerge and destroy it from within. Then, by turns, through the body’s various complex systems that fail — nervous, circulatory, respiratory, and digestive. Numerous types of accidents are listed, before assaults, the deaths inflicted by other people.

      It is not until the very bottom of that long sheet that another genre of death is noted, a standalone that seems to require no external element, no disease, no invasion: “Intentional self-harm and events of undetermined intent”.

      This oblique little phrase stands out first of all because of the number alongside it — 5,158. Folding in provisional figures from Scotland and Northern Ireland, 6,233 people in the UK died by suicide in 2013 — an age standardised rate of around 12 per 100,000 population. It accounts for over 1% of all deaths, killing over three times more people than road accidents, more than leukaemia, more than all infectious and parasitic diseases combined. But there’s another reason, one that at first glance looks like it could be a typographical error. The list shows men are almost four times more likely than women to kill themselves.

      In 2013, the last year for which records are available, 4,858 men in the UK took their own lives, compared to 1,375 women. While overall UK suicide rates per 100,000 people have declined from 14.9 in 1981 to 11.6 in 2012, this is mostly because the female suicide rate has fully halved in that period. By contrast, the male rate has shown only a very marginal decrease from 1981, with the number of male suicides reported in 2013 actually representing a 15-year high. More men in Britain died by suicide in the past year than have British soldiers perished in all wars since 1945.

      This mysterious gender disparity is a worldwide phenomenon. A 2014 World Health Organization report, Preventing Suicide: A global imperative, found that over 800,000 people worldwide die by suicide annually, with the male suicide rate higher than the female rate in all but a tiny handful of countries. The disparity was highest in Europe, where the overall male suicide rate is around 4.5 times the female rate, rising to a factor of six in countries such as Lithuania that suffer with the highest overall rates.

      And yet, the story of male suicide remains largely untold. Occasionally, the demise of a celebrity much reviled or much loved, or of someone uncommonly rich, beautiful, or tragic, will bring a spotlight of brief headlines and morbid conjecture. Self-killing unsettles and confuses like no other form of death. After all, the most powerful instinct of humanity is to survive, to endure somehow, someway, in spite of it all.

      A sticky residue of shame remains. Christian thinkers from Augustine onward considered suicide a mortal sin, breaking the commandment “thou shalt not kill” and stymieing God’s absolute power over life and death. Suicide was illegal under English law until 1961, and even now the Canon Law of the Church of England stipulates that, as with the unbaptised or excommunicated, a man who “being of sound mind have laid violent hands upon himself” will not be entitled to a full and proper burial ceremony.

      These different ways of “othering” those who kill themselves, the comforting relapse to the idea that such deaths are rare and

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