The Reducing Male Suicide (RMS) Cluster aims to purposefully work across UBC faculties and externally with national and international partners to create and mobilize knowledge to de-stigmatize men’s mental illness and suicidality, reduce disparities in care, and lead effective male suicide prevention interventions globally.
Claiming the lives of 528,000 boys’ and men each year, male suicide is a significant global health issue (1). Consistent with these worldwide patterns, Canadian male suicide rates have remained high over the last two decades (2) occurring at 3 times the rate of females (3). Despite this longstanding issue, men’s experiences of suicidality and pathways to suicide are poorly understood (4) amid widespread failures to sustain men’s community-based suicide prevention programs or implement gender-sensitized professional mental health care services (5).
The RMS Cluster consists of 13 members from various institutions across Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia. The international, emergent team will focus on the following three themes:
Men's health inequities
What are the key research findings around culturally and gender-sensitized community-based programs as critically important to reducing male suicide?
The experiences of men who seek, and clinicians who provide, mental health care
Exploring the relationships between men’s mental illnesses (including depression) and suicide risk.
Relationships between men’s mental illnesses (including depression and anxiety) and suicide risk
What can we better understand from men’s experiences of health and the mental health care services that are key to guiding effective gender- sensitized services and resourcing vulnerable sub-groups?
The RMS cluster is committed to principles of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and is inspired by UBC’s Inclusion Action Plan and commitment to the Dimensions pilot for EDI in research.