Feminist Julie Burchill’s Son Jack (29) Has Killed Himself

By Mike Buchanan: I was deeply saddened to learn that Julie Burchill’s son Jack (29) committed suicide earlier this week. The Telegraph piece on the matter is here. Hopefully Ms Burchill now has more sympathy for young male suicide victims than she displayed in a callous Guardian article in 1999 – here. My thanks to Dave for the link to the Guardian piece, which ends:

To ask me to feel sympathy with suicides after witnessing this (the death of her father from asbestos-induced cancer) is, I suggest, just as unfeeling and ignorant as my callousness must appear to you – like asking a starving African to sympathise with an anorexic. In a society still beset with the most vicious social deprivation and rampant cruelty to the very young, the very old and the very weak, the voluntary exits of a few hundred able-bodied young men each year are best dealt with as private tragedies rather than a public concern. Let them go.

Suicide is the leading cause of death of British men under 50, and the male:female suicide differential has more than doubled in 30 years, from 1.7:1 to 3.5:1.
My recent International Business Times article on male suicide is here.  

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