Agree with everything else you say, but really, the undoubted male suicide crisis has nothing to do with ignoring this crisis to focus instead on patriarchal attitudes. It's almost the opposite - the continued fixation from men on maintaining fixed gender roles (which obviously disadvantages women massively; the less appreciated aspect being that men also suffer hugely from a system they in essence created) has to bear much of the responsibility, so that talking about one's feelings = a 'feminine' trait, rather than a human one, and stoicism in the face of any amount of emotional pain continues to be seen as 'male'. Men create this prison for themselves. Until men 'allow' other men to seek help for mental health issues by creating a more open culture of maleness (and not shaming them for it), then men will continue to kill themselves at alarming rates.
As you say, terrible underfunding and incompetence, as in so many areas, makes everything a lot worse.
patriarchal attitudes have been far more entrenched in the past, but there arent anywhere near the same the rates of correlation with suicide, not by a huge margin.
equally mental health services have never been so expansive (yet still sketchy as fuck).
yet essentially you're saying rates of male suicide are down to males suppressing emotions, that this is a patriarchal prison, stoically self-made & self-perpetuating = really?
in Britain the "system" isnt fit for purpose, its beyond broken, its shattered, so men dont know where to turn to and when they do their GP will default to low-level pharmacology/anti-depressants/benzos.
hence, one of the main fault-lines lies firmly within the remit of primary care - GP's are dismissive & prone to delaying referrals to CMHT's, even then if you DO get to see a primary care mental health counselor, chances are you wont see a consultant (maybe an inexperienced SHO straight out of uni if you're exceptionally lucky), you'll receive an inappropriately short course of CBT (10 one hr sessions is farcical) then get discharged, which begs the question who is diagnosing what & when?
the 4 suicides i've known were all trapped in a systemic labyrinth, all sought help repeatedly, all were rebuffed time & time again, NONE got thru to secondary care CMHT's & all were chemically coshed with inappropriate meds from various GP's compounded by never seeing the same GP twice....all 4 cases are now in some state or another under investigation by the Health Ombudsman....2 might give your argument some sense of cohesion, but 4?
mental health is a societal & political taboo, not simply a self-made male prison, because unless you experience the labyrinth that passes for "duty of care" personally & up-close as a "client" (or patient like McMurphy), you can never genuinely empathize with or recognize the scale of the problem.
to blame it on patriarchal attitudes is, from this human's perspective, naive at best &, sorry to say it, misguided identity-politics based "professional" misjudgement @ worst.
you need to pull your focus back, talk to mental health CPN's about why their burn-out rate is so high, study where the bottle-necks are & why they're so severe, the relationship these aspects have on the people who dont know the system they're seeking help from until they've spent years receiving inappropriate care & then reappraise
how we can collectively save more souls from such a diabolical thicket of chaos.
scuse the tone, but the health-care system, its repeated under-funding by various political administrations & any semblance of workable reform, are the real culprits.
male traits? pull the other one.