Important Note: This video and post discuss men’s mental health, self-harm, and suicide. If this brings up difficult feelings for you or someone you know, please remember you do not have to carry it alone. Immediate, free, and confidential help is available 24/7. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or MensLine Australia on 1300 78 99 78.
In Parliament on June 16, I spoke during Men’s Health Week to confront a silent, heavy crisis tearing through families right across Tasmania.
Drawing on the raw, honest conversations shared with me by locals during the Clint Ewington Walk in Legana, I wanted to strip away the taboo and address the brutal reality of our male suicide statistics. This speech was a direct message to the men of Tasmania to forcefully challenge the single most dangerous lie a bloke can tell himself when he’s sitting in the deepest darkness—the belief that his family, his mates, and the world would somehow be better off without him.
That is an absolute untruth.
Every single man in our community has value, and your family is always stronger with you staying with us. To any bloke doing it tough right now: please, don’t try to just push through it alone. Reaching out isn’t a weakness, it’s a responsibility. Watch the full address below, and please check in on your mates.
Mr FERGUSON (Bass) – This is Men’s Health Week, and I want to speak about men’s mental health and men’s physical health. On Sunday, I was really pleased to be joined by about 150 people—easily 150 plus—at Riverside at the Clint Ewington Walk, which was organized by the wonderful people at the Legana Cricket Club and Legana Rotary.
I’m so grateful to those clubs and organizations for bringing us together, and I was so encouraged to see people from all walks of life and ages coming together to support our men. I particularly want to acknowledge Jamie Campbell and his work through Spoke to a Bloke, along with Jared Wells, Matt Dingjan from Run for Change, Chris Demeyer from the Legana Cricket Club, and Claire Rechberger from Legana Rotary. They, among others, are wonderful people taking action in our local community.
The turnout was encouraging, but also it reminded us that we have a lot of work to do. I want to contribute to our society doing a better job of normalizing what I call real conversations about mental health. It’s not just about stigma, but there is that. I just want us to be more willing to ask direct questions about the people around us—real conversations.
And the statistics tell us why we must. In previous contributions, I’ve spoken about how our suicide rate in Tasmania compares with road trauma. But we hear so much more about road trauma; we need to hear more about protecting lives from self-harm, especially for our men, where three-quarters of our men—we’re over-represented in our suicide statistics here in Tasmania.
Every day around our country, around five working-aged Australian men are taking their own lives. That’s five men yesterday, five men today, and unfortunately, probably five more men tomorrow. And left behind by every one of those men is a family, a group of friends, work colleagues, people who care about them, and certainly a community left behind asking whether there was something, “Possibly was there something more I could have done?” And we’ve all experienced that. I have.
And over the years, I’ve spoken with many men who have struggled with their mental health. They’ve battled suicidal thoughts or found themselves in a place of deep hopelessness. And what strikes me is that most actually do not truly want to end their lives. And that was reflected in conversations that I had over our 10k walk on Sunday—real conversations where people were sharing from the heart. What they do want is for the pain to stop; they want the pain to be over.
I also experienced a realization from my walk with one man, and a real conversation that he shared with me. He really shone a light on something that helped me solve one of my unanswered questions, and that is that there is a lie involved. One of the most dangerous lies a man can tell himself is the idea that the people around him would somehow be better off without him, that the world might be better off without me, that my family—”I’m such a burden, they’ll be better off without me.”
That’s the lie, Honourable Speaker and colleagues, that’s the untruth. It’s so false. But I recognize that it’s the feeling and the belief that may be held by that man in his hour of darkness, in his time of need. I want to say that families don’t recover from that loss entirely, and family and friends will carry that grief for years. And communities are losing people that are needed, that are valued, and that are actually, in fact, loved.
So tonight, I want to say something very directly to the men of Tasmania, and that is this: you are loved. Bloke, we need you. Man, the people around you will be worse off without you. Your community is better off with you in it. Your family and loved ones will be stronger with you staying with us.
And it’s a message that I hope we can all take out of this Parliament and continue to promote. We need you, your family needs you, your state needs you, but please reach out for help because we know that you’re in a difficult place, a dark place. But there are people who care enough to want to help you through it, to help you live for tomorrow and know that that would have been, as was shared with me in that real conversation, that would have been a bad decision.
