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From Research to Action — How Finland Helped Its Men
Post 2 in a series on what the world can learn from Finland’s suicide prevention efforts
September 08, 2025
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In the last post, we saw how Finland took an extraordinary first step: instead of shrugging at suicide rates, they studied every single case in the country for a full year. They learned who was dying, where, and why.

But research alone doesn’t save lives. The true test came next. Could Finland turn this knowledge into action?

In 1992, the government launched the National Suicide Prevention Project, a sweeping, nationwide effort that would run for five years. Its ambition was bold: to translate the research into targeted interventions across every layer of society — from army barracks to hunting cabins, from classrooms to church pulpits.

The official goal was clear: reduce suicides by 20% in ten years. But the real innovation lay in how Finland went about it.


The National Strategy (1992–1996)

The project was structured into four phases:

  1. Research (1986–1991) — the “Suicides in Finland 1987” study and its provincial reports.

  2. Strategy formation (1992) — drawing up a national action plan based on those findings.

  3. Implementation (1992–1996) — launching over 40 subprogrammes across sectors.

  4. Evaluation (1997 onward) — both internal and external reviews of what worked and what didn’t.

Unlike typical health campaigns, this was not limited to posters or hotlines. It was a multisectoral strategy, pulling in schools, the military, the church, health services, media, and community associations. Each was asked the same question: What role can you play in preventing suicide, based on what we now know?

This was Finland’s genius. The national strategy was not a blunt instrument. It was a framework that allowed each institution, each community, to shape prevention in a way that made sense locally.


Tailoring Interventions to At-Risk Groups

The 1987 research had given Finland something precious: a map of where suicide risk was concentrated. The next step was to design interventions for those specific groups.

Hunters and Rural Men

Middle-aged rural men were at the very center of Finland’s crisis. Many were farmers or hunters, living in isolation, often drinking heavily, and reluctant to seek formal help. The suicide data showed that licensed hunting rifles were among the most common methods.

Instead of preaching from afar, Finland did something remarkable: they went into the hunting clubs themselves. The idea was simple but powerful — hunters already cared about their “mehtäkaveri,” their hunting mate. So why not train them to look out for each other’s mental health as well?

This became the foundation for what later grew into the Hyvä Mehtäkaveri (“Good Hunting Mate”) programme: peer-support training that taught hunters how to ask the difficult question — “Are you doing okay?” — and how to connect someone with help if they weren’t.

Conscripts and Rejected Recruits

Finland’s system of compulsory military service turned out to be both a risk and an opportunity. The research showed that young men rejected from service for health or psychological reasons faced a sharp rise in suicide risk. The rejection carried stigma — it marked them as different at precisely the age when they most wanted to belong.

So the Defense Forces became a frontline partner. Officers and military doctors were trained to spot vulnerable recruits, offer counseling, and refer them to civilian health care when needed. Rejection from service was reframed, not as abandonment, but as a moment to connect a young man with support.

Beyond counseling, Finland also recognized the practical challenges these young men faced. Initiatives supported by the A-Clinic Foundation and the Finnish Association for Mental Health provided concrete assistance: vocational guidance, social support, and structured activities to help rebuild identity and belonging. These efforts aimed to ensure that rejection from the army did not mean rejection from society. One notable example was the “Young Man, Seize the Day” project (1997), which worked with rejected recruits in several cities to provide vocational guidance, structured activities, and community belonging.

Rural Networks and Gatekeepers

Beyond the army and the hunting cabin, Finland leaned on local gatekeepers — the people already embedded in small communities. Teachers, clergy, police officers, even farmer’s association leaders were given training to recognize warning signs and start conversations. The principle was clear: suicide prevention wasn’t just the job of psychiatrists. It was the job of the whole community.

Alcohol Misuse

Alcohol had long been tied to Finnish male suicide, and the research confirmed its role. The project partnered with the A-Clinic Foundation, Finland’s leading addiction services, to integrate substance treatment into suicide prevention. Men who might never walk into a psychiatric clinic might still accept help for their drinking — and through that doorway, receive broader support.

Suicide Attempters

One of the most striking findings from the research was how many people who died by suicide had already made a prior attempt — but had never received proper follow-up care. The project responded by pushing hospitals to change their protocols: no longer would a suicide attempt be treated only as an emergency to be “patched up.” It was to be seen as a red flag demanding structured aftercare.


Engaging Institutions Beyond Health Care

One of the most radical features of Finland’s approach was the insistence that suicide prevention was not just a medical problem. It was a problem for the whole of society — and so the whole of society was asked to respond.

Schools

Teachers and guidance counsellors were trained to notice the early signs of distress in students. Peer-support programs were introduced so that young people themselves could be allies for one another. The idea was to catch suffering early, long before it showed up in statistics.

Churches

In rural Finland, the local parish was often more trusted than the clinic. Clergy were trained to recognize warning signs, offer crisis counseling, and support families after a suicide. By drawing pastors and priests into the project, Finland tapped into one of its most powerful social institutions.

Media

The project also confronted one of the most sensitive issues: how suicide was reported in newspapers and on television. Journalists were given new guidelines — no sensationalism, no detailed descriptions of methods, and always include information about where to find help. The aim was to prevent copycat deaths and shift the narrative from despair to support.

Workplaces

Though less developed than other strands, workplaces were not ignored. Employers were encouraged to recognize stress and depression among workers, especially men in male-dominated industries like farming, forestry, and manufacturing. Early versions of employee assistance programs began to take shape.


The Male Coping Strategies Programme (Planned but Unfinished)

Among all the subprogrammes Finland envisioned, one stood out for its directness: the Male Coping Strategies Programme.

The research had made it impossible to ignore: Finnish men — especially rural, middle-aged men — were at the center of the suicide crisis. They were less likely to seek help, more likely to drink heavily, more likely to use firearms, and more likely to die by suicide.

The Male Coping Strategies Program was designed to tackle this head-on. Its aim was simple but radical:

  • To help men talk openly about their struggles.

  • To normalize seeking help.

  • To strengthen resilience in ways that fit male culture.

The plan included a public information campaign that would have framed help-seeking not as weakness but as strength. It also envisioned building spaces for men to talk — whether through workplaces, community organizations, or even informal networks.

But the program ran into the one barrier no research can overcome: funding. It never received the resources it needed to stand on its own. Instead, pieces of it were absorbed into other projects, most visibly in the military programs for conscripts and rejected recruits.

Even so, its very existence was telling. In the 1990s, Finland was willing to say openly what many countries still refuse to: male suicide is a gendered issue, and if you want to prevent it, you must address men directly.

And although the national campaign never fully materialized, its spirit lived on. Later, local projects like Hyvä Mehtäkaveri in Kainuu — which embedded suicide prevention into rural hunting clubs — were, in a sense, the Male Coping Strategies Programme reborn in community form.


Results

By the mid-1990s, Finland’s gamble was starting to pay off.

Suicide rates, which had climbed steadily for decades, peaked in 1990. Then, during the years of the project’s implementation, they began to fall. By 1996, suicides had dropped by about 20% from that peak, bringing the numbers below where they had started a decade earlier.

The change wasn’t just in the statistics. Across Finland, you could see new practices taking root:

  • Hospitals no longer discharged suicide attempters without follow-up.

  • Journalists wrote about suicide more responsibly.

  • Teachers and clergy were equipped to recognize distress.

  • Hunters and soldiers had begun to see suicide prevention as something that concerned them too.

An internal evaluation in the late 1990s found that 43% of service sectors reported adopting suicide prevention measures as a result of the project. More than a dozen working models had been developed, along with 70+ publications, training guides, and handbooks.

An external international review in 1999 concluded that the project’s achievements outweighed its shortcomings. The reviewers praised its breadth, creativity, and impact. They noted some gaps — the elderly had been largely overlooked, and the long-term anchoring of prevention into municipal structures was still weak — but the core finding was clear: Finland had changed the trajectory of suicide in the country.

The numbers proved it. And behind those numbers were lives saved.


Why This Matters

The Finnish project showed something the world badly needed to see: suicide prevention works when you meet people where they are.

Instead of waiting for men to walk into clinics, Finland brought prevention to the places where men already lived their lives:

  • In the forests and hunting cabins with their friends.

  • In the army barracks or on the day they were turned away from service.

  • In the pulpit, the classroom, and the local newspaper.

They refused the fatalism of “men won’t seek help.” They built a system that didn’t rely on men crossing the threshold of a psychiatrist’s office. It relied on communities, networks, and everyday institutions to notice, to care, and to act.

And the results speak for themselves: a 20% reduction in suicide rates during the project period. Hundreds of lives saved. A culture shifted.

The contrast with the United States could not be starker. Here, suicide among men — especially middle-aged rural men — is often treated as an inevitability. Our prevention strategies remain vague, underfunded, and detached from the very communities where the deaths are happening.

Finland’s lesson is clear: if you want to prevent suicide, you cannot stop at awareness campaigns and crisis hotlines. You must go out and build support into the fabric of everyday life — in the places where people already gather, work, and belong.


Coming Next: Finland’s Legacy

By the end of the 1990s, Finland had achieved something unprecedented: a national, research-based suicide prevention program that actually bent the curve downward. It wasn’t perfect — some groups were overlooked, funding wasn’t always secure, and not every community took the work as far as it could go. But the results were undeniable.

The project left behind more than lower suicide rates. It left behind a set of models, training tools, and cultural shifts that would ripple across the Nordic region and, eventually, far beyond. Other countries began to take notice. And at the same time, another Finnish innovation — a quiet revolution in psychiatric care called Open Dialogue — was spreading internationally, offering yet another way to reduce suffering and save lives.

In the next post, we’ll look at Finland’s legacy: how their suicide prevention ideas influenced other nations, what worked and what didn’t, and how a small country in the north became a global leader in rethinking how we respond to despair.

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W​omen’s Studies was Never About Study

W​omen’s Studies was Never About Study

For decades, Women’s Studies has held a privileged place in academia. From its earliest days, it was never a neutral or exploratory field—it was born out of activism, not inquiry. The goal was not to ask open questions about gender, but to advance a political framework that saw women as oppressed and men as privileged. It promised to give women a collective voice and to expose the “hidden structures” of patriarchy, but from the beginning, its conclusions were already written into its premises.

From Activism to Orthodoxy

Women’s Studies emerged in the late 1960s as an explicitly ideological project, shaped by the political currents of second-wave feminism. Its founders were activists first and academics second. The programs they built were not designed to test ideas but to institutionalize a belief system—that society was organized around male domination and that liberation required dismantling it. Rather than studying whether patriarchy existed, Women’s Studies set out to document how it did, embedding the theory of oppression into every syllabus. What began as political conviction soon became academic dogma.

A Closed Loop of Certainty

Once the framework of oppression was installed as unquestionable truth, the field began to police its own boundaries. Dissent was not debated—it was pathologized. To question the narrative of systemic male power was to “uphold patriarchy.” To suggest that men face distinct forms of hardship was to be told you were shifting attention away from women — that you were “making it about men.”​ Even sympathetic scholars who urged more balance found themselves marginalized. In time, Women’s Studies became a self-reinforcing system—its theories generating its evidence, its evidence confirming its theories. The goal was no longer discovery but preservation of the ideology itself.

Theory Without Tether

Much of the writing in Women’s Studies rests on sweeping abstractions: “patriarchy,” “privilege,” “internalized oppression,” “toxic masculinity.” These terms are often treated not as hypotheses to be tested but as truths to be applied. Shulamith Firestone declared that “the goal of the feminist revolution must be… the elimination of the sex distinction itself.” bell hooks wrote that “patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit.” Such claims are not evidence-based conclusions; they are moral declarations — proclamations of belief.

When theory replaces evidence, conversation dies. Instead of exploring how men and women differ in complex, sometimes complementary ways, Women’s Studies tends to flatten the picture into one story: oppressors and oppressed.

The Disappearing Male

Ironically, as the field expanded into “Gender Studies,” men nearly vanished from the picture except as symbols of privilege or threat. Rarely do these programs explore male pain, fatherhood, or the male experience of relational loss, shame, or sacrifice. When male suffering is acknowledged, it’s often reframed as a symptom of “toxic masculinity” — as though men’s pain merely confirms the theory rather than complicates it.

If academia truly cared about gender, it would study men as carefully and compassionately as it studies women. But in the current climate, even suggesting that balance is considered suspect.

Power, Not Understanding

Modern Women’s and Gender Studies have largely shifted from studying what is to prescribing what should be. The core pursuit is no longer knowledge but power — the power to define social norms, influence policy, and shape language. As a result, universities now graduate students steeped in theory but poorly equipped to engage with those who don’t share their ideological framework. The field’s inward focus breeds division rather than understanding.

Why It Matters

This isn’t just an academic squabble. The ideas born in Women’s Studies now drive policies in media, law, education, and corporate culture. They shape how we talk about men and women, how we define fairness, and how we teach our children about themselves. When a discipline insists that one sex’s narrative of oppression defines the truth, it narrows empathy for the other half of humanity.

A truly balanced study of gender would ask harder questions — not how to dismantle men, but how men and women can understand each other more deeply. Until that shift happens, Women’s Studies will remain less a study of truth than a sermon about power.

Men Are Good


Note:
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October 20, 2025
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Reproductive Rights End at Ejaculation: How Men Lost Control Over Parenthood


Reproductive Rights End at Ejaculation: How Men Lost Control Over Parenthood

It’s one of the most unspoken truths in modern life: once conception occurs, men have no reproductive rights. A woman can choose to keep a pregnancy or end it. She can decide to raise the child or place it for adoption. A man, on the other hand, is bound—socially, legally, and financially—to whatever decision she makes.

That imbalance is so normalized that few even notice it. When the topic arises, most people reflexively defend the status quo. “Well, it’s her body.” Of course it is. But what’s rarely considered is that while women have control over their bodies, men have no control over their futures.

“The man’s genetic material, his emotional capacity, his finances, and his lifelong identity as a father or a stranger—all of it hangs on someone else’s choice. A woman’s responsibility is conditional; a man’s is absolute.

And this asymmetry is defended not as a moral dilemma to be resolved, but as a settled truth.


The Silent Consent Trap

We’ve been taught to think that when a man consents to sex, he consents to everything that might follow. But when a woman consents to sex, she still retains the right to decide afterward whether to become a mother.

This moral sleight of hand is stunning once you notice it. One person’s consent is treated as final and binding; the other’s is treated as provisional and revocable.

And yet this assumption—so old it feels invisible—forms the bedrock of modern reproductive law.

If a pregnancy occurs and the man doesn’t want to be a father, the system tells him, “Too bad. You should have thought of that earlier.” If the woman doesn’t want to be a mother, society says, “She has a right to choose.”

Both positions can’t be reconciled under any serious notion of equality.


The Price of Powerlessness

For many men, the consequence isn’t only financial—it’s existential.

Imagine discovering that someone chose to bring a child into the world with your DNA, against your will, and that you’ll now spend 18 years paying for the decision you didn’t make. Imagine learning that a partner deceived you about contraception, or tampered with protection, and you’re told by the court that none of that matters.

Your body, your consent, your word—irrelevant.

The state considers you responsible for what someone else decided to do with your biology.

The irony is brutal: men are lectured about “taking responsibility,” but responsibility without consent is not morality—it’s servitude.

And while precise numbers are impossible to know, the scale of this problem is enormous. Countless men quietly accept pregnancies they would have preferred to avoid—not because they chose fatherhood, but because the law left them no voice in the matter. For every man who speaks out, many more simply submit to a fate decided by someone else. And this imbalance cuts both ways. Just as some men are forced into fatherhood they didn’t choose, others are denied fatherhood they deeply want. Many have stood by helplessly as a pregnancy they hoped to cherish was ended—not because they were careless or uncommitted, but because the law gave them no voice. For them, “her choice” becomes their grief, and that grief is treated as if it doesn’t exist.

And beneath that larger injustice lies an even starker reality: a measurable percentage of pregnancies begin with deliberate deception. Studies conservatively estimate that 1–3% of fathers are unknowingly raising children who are not biologically theirs. Men who uncover the truth and challenge paternity are often ordered to keep paying anyway, because “it’s in the best interest of the child.”

In other words, the legal system tells men that even being lied to about fatherhood doesn’t matter—your wallet still belongs to the child, and by extension, to the mother who deceived you. It’s her body, her choice—and your wallet, her choice too.


Moral Courage and the Empathy Gap

Why is there so little outrage about this? Because when men suffer, empathy tends to vanish.

We can see this in how society responds to female pain—mobilizing instantly, funding shelters, rewriting laws—and how it responds to male pain—with indifference, mockery, or moral lectures.

A man who feels trapped by fatherhood he didn’t choose is told he’s irresponsible or immature. A woman who feels trapped by motherhood she didn’t choose is seen as courageous for seeking control. And when a man feels trapped by abortion—when he longs to protect the life of his own child but is powerless to stop its ending—his pain is dismissed as interference in someone else’s right.

This empathy gap runs so deep that even discussing male reproductive rights feels taboo. People worry it undermines women’s freedom, as if equality for one sex must come at the other’s expense.

But fairness isn’t a zero-sum game. Equality doesn’t mean less compassion for women—it means more honesty for everyone.


The “Financial Abortion” Idea

One idea, sometimes called “paper abortion” or “financial abortion,” proposes that men should be able to relinquish legal parenthood within a set time early in pregnancy—mirroring a woman’s right to choose abortion or adoption.

Critics say it lets men “walk away from their responsibilities.” But this criticism misses the point: responsibility must follow consent. You can’t demand moral or financial duty from someone who had no voice in the decision that created it.

If women can legally choose parenthood, men should at least be able to choose not to be one.

Otherwise, what we call equality is really a kind of gendered servitude—freedom for one sex, obligation for the other.


Consent and Control

At its heart, the issue of reproductive rights for men isn’t about sex. It’s about consent, autonomy, and the meaning of equality.

In every other area of life, consent without control is invalid.
If someone borrows your car without permission, you don’t owe them gas money because “the trip already happened.” If a doctor performs a surgery you didn’t consent to, it’s malpractice—even if they believed it would help.

Yet when it comes to reproduction, we abandon that principle completely.

Men’s consent ends at ejaculation. From that moment on, everything that follows—the pregnancy, the birth, the lifelong obligation—is out of their hands.

And society calls this justice.


The Deeper Consequence

When men feel they have no control over one of life’s most defining events—whether or not they become a father—it fuels a quiet kind of despair. It teaches them that their choices don’t matter, that their voices are disposable, that their role in reproduction is purely mechanical.

It also weakens trust between men and women. True partnership depends on mutual agency and mutual accountability. When one side holds all the power, resentment grows.

This isn’t just a legal problem; it’s a relational one. Many young men today fear relationships precisely because they sense this imbalance—because they know that in the eyes of the law and culture, they have no reproductive rights, only responsibilities.


A Culture That Values Both Sexes

Reproductive fairness shouldn’t be controversial. If we truly believe in equality, then both sexes deserve the same moral and legal respect for their choices.

That means we need to have the courage to ask hard questions:

  • Should men have the right to decline fatherhood when women can decline motherhood?

  • Should paternity testing be standard, to protect both fathers and children from deception?

  • Should reproductive coercion—like lying about birth control—be treated as seriously as forcing a woman into pregnancy?

Equality isn’t about punishing women or freeing men from moral duty. It’s about aligning rights with responsibilities, and recognizing that both sexes have an equal stake in the creation of life.

Until that happens, we’ll keep pretending that justice exists where it doesn’t—and men will keep paying the price for choices they didn’t make.

Because in our culture, reproductive rights still end at ejaculation.

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October 16, 2025
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The Engineered Isolation of Men
 


The Engineered Isolation of Men

For decades, society has been dismantling the three foundations that once anchored men: work, identity, and family. What we call a “men’s crisis” isn’t just about depression or suicide—it’s about systematic disconnection. When a man loses his place to contribute, his right to belong, and the respect that once gave him pride, he doesn’t merely suffer; he disappears.


1. The First Cut: Economic Displacement

For most men, work is more than a paycheck—it’s proof of worth. Through skill, labor, and persistence, men find identity and belonging. But modern economies have quietly stripped that away. Factories closed, trades devalued, and risk-taking jobs replaced by automation or overseas labor.

Men were told to “adapt,” but few noticed what they were adapting to: a world that no longer needs them in the ways that once gave them purpose. Unemployment doesn’t just steal income—it steals function. And when function vanishes, meaning follows close behind.

History bears this out. During the Great Depression, when millions of men were cut off from productive work, suicide rates climbed to record highs. A man’s worth had been tied to his usefulness, and when society no longer needed that usefulness, despair filled the vacuum. Yet during the world wars, when men were again called upon to serve, build, and defend, suicide rates fell sharply—even in the face of danger and loss. The difference wasn’t comfort, but purpose.

Research confirms what common sense already knows: long-term unemployment raises men’s suicide risk several-fold. Not because men are fragile, but because usefulness was the thread holding their lives together. When that thread breaks, they fall—not from weakness, but from the weight of purposelessness.

A culture that robs men of purpose is a culture engineering their isolation.


2. The Second Cut: Moral Displacement Through Shame

Even men who keep their jobs often lose something deeper—the right to feel proud of being men.

The term toxic masculinity didn’t just critique bad behavior; it redefined maleness itself as suspect. Strength, stoicism, leadership, and competitiveness—traits once considered virtues—became moral liabilities. Men were told that their instincts were dangerous, their achievements oppressive, their nature defective.

This isn’t self-improvement; it’s cultural shaming.
When a man is told his strength makes him unsafe, he hides it. When he’s told his logic makes him cold, he doubts it. Over time, he disconnects—not only from others but from his own nature.

And shame is the most isolating emotion of all. It tells a person, you don’t belong anymore.
A shamed man withdraws, not because he doesn’t care, but because every gesture of care risks being misinterpreted. His silence isn’t indifference—it’s self-protection in a culture that punishes his voice.


3. The Third Cut: The Forced Separation of Divorce

Then there is the wound that goes straight to the heart: divorce.

In countless cases, it’s not just a separation of spouses—it’s the erasure of fatherhood. Courts presume maternal virtue and paternal suspicion. Even loving, stable fathers are reduced to “visitors,” permitted only fragments of the lives they helped create.

For a man whose identity revolves around providing, protecting, and mentoring, losing daily contact with his children is devastating. It is grief without a funeral—a living bereavement he’s expected to endure without complaint.

The statistics are grim: divorced men have some of the highest suicide rates of any demographic. Not because they’ve failed as fathers, but because the system has forbidden them to succeed. When the law itself enforces separation, the message is unmistakable: you’re no longer needed.


4. The Result: A Culture of Quiet Exile

Take these three together—economic displacement, moral shaming, and family loss—and you get the blueprint for male disconnection.
Each cut severs a man from one of the three bonds that make life meaningful:

  • Work (purpose)

  • Identity (dignity)

  • Family (love)

A man without purpose feels restless.
A man without dignity feels ashamed.
A man without love feels invisible.
And when all three disappear at once, the result isn’t just sadness—it’s annihilation.


5. What the Culture Gets Wrong

Modern culture mistakes this for fragility: “Men just need to talk more.”
But talking doesn’t rebuild meaning.
What men need isn’t therapy in isolation—it’s reconnection to the structures that once made their lives coherent.

A man can’t talk his way out of being unnecessary.
He can only live his way back into usefulness, belonging, and respect.

That requires social systems that recognize men as contributors, not relics; as protectors, not problems.


6. The Way Back

The solution isn’t to “save” men—it’s to restore their place in the human story:

  • Rebuild economic paths that value masculine work.

  • Reclaim cultural respect for masculine virtues.

  • Reform family law so fatherhood is a right, not a privilege.

  • Speak openly about the moral injury of being labeled toxic for existing.

Men don’t need saving — they need a place to stand again.
Give them that, and they’ll rebuild everything else.

Men Are Good.

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