In his book Of Boys and Men, researcher Richard Reeves writes, “Men are much more likely to commit suicide than women. This is a worldwide long-standing pattern.” Reeves quotes an article from 2019 in Harper’s Magazine that talked about the sense of purposelessness among modern men. The author of the article states, “Several of my male friends struggled with addiction and depression, or other conditions that could be named, but the more common complaint was something vaguer …. A quiet desperation that, if I were forced to generalize, seemed to stem from a gnawing sense of purposelessness.”

Another study on male suicides tracked the words or phrases that men who have attempted suicide most often used to describe themselves. At the top of the list were two words: useless and worthless.