by Dr Ishma Harford
Three Grenadian men died by suicide in one week recently. Not from accidents or the chronic diseases we spend years fighting. Three men decided that the weight of whatever they were carrying was more than they could bear, and they surrendered with irreversible finality.
It is Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month. The timing is, in the most painful sense, appropriate.
As a concept, mental health has become so familiar that it risks losing gravity. In Grenada and the Caribbean at large, there is a palpable gap between the mental health discourse and its reality.
Mental health is misconstrued as an abstract branch of medicine. More practically, it is the colour of our experience of everyday life, the feelings borne of it, and the whispers that tell us whether we are okay or not. It is the invisible canvas our lives are painted on, day by day, moment by moment. And because of that invisibility, it goes unappreciated until it is unintentionally forfeited.
For many, that breaking point is uncomfortably too near.
We have a way of telling boys to be strong. Don’t cry. Provision. Protection. Composure. Emotion is a liability. Vulnerability is weakness. And so, boys learn to hide whatever they feels: under the rug, at the back of his mind, and behind the façade he shows the world.
The mask becomes the person, the persona.
By the time a man is drowning, he has performed composure for so long that the performance becomes his reality. Something is wrong, but he does not have the words, the self-given permission, or the first clue of where to even start. Should he see a therapist? Where would he even find one? What would it cost? What would his friends think? Isn’t that more for women and children? The questions pile up, and the crisis gets folded into doubt and despair: unappreciated, unaddressed, and maybe most importantly, unspoken.
Three men in one week is what this crisis looks like today.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a death by suicide occurs every 40 seconds, and men at nearly twice the rate of women. In Grenada, the cause insidiously inhabits the space between a culture that teaches men to need nothing and a system that offers very little if they ask. Grenada has no dedicated national suicide line, and public concern that rarely outlasts the headline. A trained therapist is expensive, hard to find, and somehow even harder to book. Psychiatric services are centralised, stretched, and stigmatised. The man who is struggling and the man who is aware enough to seek help face the same wall of poor access and the cultural script that tells them the effort is questionable to begin with.
This is not a personal failing. It is a system failing the people it exists to serve, and the failure of our society at large. All of us: the men and women who make Grenada a nation and not an island.
Yet systems are what we make them. They can change, and ours may finally be starting to. Last week, on the Grenada Broadcasting Network (GBN), it was announced that the government will launch a national suicide hotline by the end of June. That is a step in the right direction, and it deserves credit. But a promise is not yet a number anyone can call, and the men we lost this week could not wait for a launch date. An announcement becomes a lifeline only when there is a number that works, staffed by people trained to answer it. Until then, what fills the gap? Three suicides in one week? We must start asking both the loud and quiet questions.
When did you last ask the men in your life how they are doing? Not in the passing, reflexive way we say good morning. Not the “fine, thanks” that gets exchanged without breaking stride. But really. Have you sat with your brother, your father, your friend, and asked him honestly and earnestly, how he is actually doing? And if the predictable, “I’m OK” surfaces, extend the olive branch. Reassure him that he’s not alone.
Dying inside is not strength. It has never been. We need our men here with us, alive and present, where we can toil, tarry together and figure it out. Death may seem like escape. But what makes life worth living is the hope of a better tomorrow: a tomorrow where men get the help they need before meeting the irreversible end. We cannot afford to keep burying them in a silence we have the power to break.
Dr Ishma Harford is a medical doctor with 5 years of experience in Grenada’s health system and a Master’s candidate in Health Analysis, Policy and Management. The Health Imperative is an educational, politically neutral column about what health means, the health system that delivers it, and all of the implications in between.
