NOT A National Suicide Prevention Strategy For Parental Alienation!

Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy has now been published, but it is not for men or women dying from suicide due to disrupted family relationships from parental alienation during separation and divorce.

Australia’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy is gendered. It fails to address the leading causes of male suicide, particularly those related to family relationship disruptions that include parental alienation.

As a result, this strategy abandons women and children enduring the same presentation.

The strategy focuses on preventing violence against women and children as a solution to male suicide. It implies that men die by suicide because they are perpetrators of gendered violence. 

The national strategy all but fails to address the single largest number of suicides in Australia (men experiencing separation and family breakdown.

This failure raises questions about competency and ideological blindness. It represents dogmatic adherence to a policy that devalues and lacks empathy for half of the Australian population. The other half are no better off!

Summary: How The National Suicide Strategy Fails

• Gendered misinterpretation of data: The document acknowledges that 75% of suicide deaths are male but does not provide a targeted prevention strategy for men.
  
• Bias Toward Women: Suicide prevention efforts focus on factors like intimate partner violence against women while ignoring similar risks for men. 
  
• Lack of Response to Family Separation: The strategy recognises that separation and divorce contribute to male and female suicide,. Nearly twice as many men as women die from suicide. Still, it does not address this psychosocial category with targeted measures for both men and women.  
  
• Exclusion of Male-Specific Causes: The strategy does not consider that men may die by suicide due to disrupted family relationships, coercive control, abuse, or family disruptions caused by their ex-partners. 
  
• Selection of support services that do not address the most significant number of deaths by suicide. Instead, it addresses comparatively smaller populations.
  
• Outdated policy frameworks that dogmatically focus on gender inequity rather than factors common to all genders.
  

Why The National Suicide Prevention Strategy Fails 

It assumes suicide is always linked to male violence

It ignores the broader and non-gendered psychosocial factors.  The National Suicide Prevention Strategy excludes the possibility that men may die from suicide because their ex-partners have been violent, abusive or coercive to them. For example, it openly acknowledges that:

• “in 2023 in Australia, just over three-quarters of all suicide deaths were among males. 2,419 male deaths at a rate of 18.0 per 100,000. Suicide is the leading cause of death for males aged 15-55”.

At the same time, when it comes to prevention strategies, it cites safety and security as a key factor. What solution do you think they proposed?

• “Advance gender equality and address the drivers of all forms of gender-based violence, including through initiatives aimed to improve community attitudes and norms toward family, domestic, and sexual violence.”

 It relies on an outdated policy framework

It uses inappropriate social determinants such as gender, sexuality, employment, and education as associated factors to suicide. These factors do not account for power imbalances in relationships beyond gender.  

This framework presumes that social problems are always associated with inequality and inequity in social factors such as age, gender, employment, and education. Therefore, the social determinant approach to policy and strategy concludes that one gender is disadvantaged by the other gender.

This outdated approach does not respond to power abuses in relationships independent of these social factors. Instead, it isn’t very objective.

On the one hand, despite its gender bias, its framework does not lead to a specific gendered strategy to address disruptions to family relationships engineered by parental alienating bejaviours. Yet it acknowledges that nearly twice as many men die than women from suicide due to family relationship disruption.

On the other hand, it claims that women die from suicide as a result of male-gendered family violence. It then provides a strategy to address just this factor.

It proposes generic suicide prevention programs without specialised interventions for men or women.

According to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy:

• Disruption of family by separation and divorce has been identified in around 1 in 6 male and 1 in 10 female suicide deaths. Intimate partner relationship problems such as romantic break-ups, arguments and conflict are also common factors in adult suicide

This psychosocial category must include parental alienation. Yet, the proposed prevention strategy is:

• “continue to provide subsidised access to counselling for people going through separation and divorce, promoted through family law services and other key touchpoints in the family law system”.

This strategy is too generic; it does not address this psychosocial factor. The reader can easily assume that such disruptions result from gendered family violence. It ignores non-gendered, bi-directional forms of violence, abuse, and coercive control.

Those statistics are serious. Nearly twice as many men as women die from suicide in this psychosocial category. “Disruption of family by separation and divorce” must, by definition, include parental alienation that significantly affects both men and women. Parental alienation is a non-gendered, bi-directional form of coercive control.

It Knows About Specialised Support Services But Refuses to Identify Them

In its listing of support services, it fails to list the one service specialising in suicidality for both men and women from disruptions to family relationships and specifically for the most significant number of suicides. It appears to use ideological considerations instead of actual risk, and the population needs to select support services.

Instead, to prevent suicide among men, who represent 75% of national suicide deaths, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy proposes ending violence against women and children. This strategy focuses on:

• “Reducing the prevalence and impact of key drivers of distress” such as ” experiences of childhood abuse and neglect, alcohol- and drug-related harm, and intimate partner violence (against females)” (P.21)

It Assumes That Men Don’t Matter Because They Are Perpetrators

The National Suicide Strategy does not explain how “reducing the prevalence and impact of […] intimate partner violence (against females) would prevent men dying from suicide. The only logical conclusions are:

• That men are perpetrators of gendered violence who then die from suicide

• Male death from suicide does not matter. The strategy should only focus on women dying from suicide.

What About Women?

Yes, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy identifies that women are especially at risk for adverse mental health outcomes such as self-harming, more so than men¹.

Given the gendered bias of the strategy, we could surmise that women are at higher risk of these adverse mental health outcomes because they are victims of gendered family violence.

Still, as previously identified here, family relationship disruption is not explicitly recognised with targeted strategies for both men and women. Even though more men than women die from suicide in this psychosocial category, the fact is they BOTH DIE!

It is acceptable for women and mothers to die from suicide due to disruptions to family relationships from separation and divorce.

We can only conclude women, mothers, and their children are acceptable casualties in the dogmatic pursuit of the ideology that makes the male gender perpetual perpetrators of gendered family violence and which refuses to accept the validity of parental alienation.

How to Make the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Effective for All Genders 

A genuinely national suicide prevention strategy should:  

• Be gender-inclusive and address suicide risk factors for both men and women.
    
• Acknowledge bi-directional abuse in relationships rather than assuming a one-sided narrative or relying on political theories that make one gender the victim of the other. 
  
• Target specific psychosocial factors, such as family disruptions and parental alienation, with appropriate interventions.  
  
• Include specialised support services, such as programs for those affected by separation and divorce (e.g., Parents Beyond Breakup).

Endnotes

1. In 2022–23, females made up almost two-thirds (66%) of intentional self-harm hospitalisations.
   Reporting of ambulance attendance data indicates higher rates of suicide attempt and self- injury (without suicidal intent) among young females compared to young males. ↩︎

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