Macho culture driving young men to suicide, warns monk

YOUNG men can become suicidal if they fail to live up to macho male stereotypes typified in sports such as rugby, a monk at a top college warned yesterday.

Br Mark Patrick Hederman, OSB of Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick, said the rugby culture associated with countries such as New Zealand and Wales, along with regions such as Munster, suggested these were places where men were really men.

Speaking at a Suicide Awareness Week meeting in Limerick, he said: “Although of course, we are completely justified in our hero worship for the men in red [Munster] ... we have to recognise that these are not the only, nor are they the ultimate paradigms of masculinity.”

Br Hederman said he knew too many young people who ended their lives because they felt their sexual identity was unacceptable to themselves as well as the society in which they were brought up in.

“Not only that, but I have known parents of such children who were devastated and distraught by their child’s suicide and tortured themselves on the rack to try and find out why a life had ended in this way,” he said.

“But when it was even hinted to them that it might have been because their son could not accept the possibility he was gay, they immediately recoiled in unrelenting anger.”

Sexuality, said Bro Hederman, grows in each person differently.

“This is a major cause of trauma for most young people and, I would say, most especially for young males. Why? Because the identikit of the young male is so macho and so stereotyped that it is like trying to put a hedgehog into a nylon stocking,” he said.

The brother said anxieties about gender and sexuality were identified in an expert group report as one of the risk factors for suicide.

“I would go further to suggest the very considerable number of males aged between 15 and 24 who are recorded as having died of suicide in the last few years suggests a very specific entrapment encountered by this age group which we need to uncover and deal with as a matter of urgency,” he said.

Br Hederman also said although the Church had changed its response to suicide, he deplored the attitude and actions through the ages of the Catholic Church towards those who have died by suicide.

“I cannot understand how leaders of the Church founded by Jesus Christ could take it upon themselves to represent the wishes of such a loving saviour by refusing burial in a Christian graveyard or the consolation of a Requiem Mass to those who ended their lives by suicide,” he added.