Profiting From Men’s Suicide – The Mental Health Cash Cow
- Jan 12
- 8 min read
Written by John Comerford, Author/Motivational Speaker
John Comerford is the author of Tarzan Loves Jane and Battle Armour (25 Tools for Men's Mental Health). John is also one of the authors of the number one Amazon best-selling book series, "Start Over."
Men in Australia keep dying by suicide at close to three times the rate of women, yet year after year, hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into mental health campaigns, charities, and hotlines. If money were the answer to fixing men’s suicide rates, it would have worked by now. The brutal truth is that the system has learned how to collect money off men’s pain, but not how to listen to men, trust their lived experience, or build the kind of real connection that actually stops a man from taking his own life.
This is not a story about insufficient funding. Rather, it highlights how funding often takes centre stage in discussions about men’s mental health, while men themselves sometimes feel unheard or overlooked.
The numbers say it’s not about “awareness”
Across just four big-name charities in Australia, well over $150 million a year now moves through the books. Much of this is raised on the back of male suicide statistics and heartbreaking stories. Men’s faces, tears, and funerals have become the emotional engine for a thriving industry of campaigns, corporate partnerships, and merchandise that promises to “change the face of men’s health”.
In 2024 alone, one men’s health charity reported raising around $137.2 million globally and roughly $32 million in income just in its Australian trustee entity, spending about $28 million and banking a surplus of around $4 million for that year. Another’s most recent national figures show revenue in the region of $118 million across a financial year, powered by government contracts, corporate partnerships, and public donations, while a third, a newer player in the market, reports more than $9 million in annual income. There is nothing small about this money.
And yet, men are still dying at nearly the same rate. The curve is not bending the way those fundraising videos imply it should. The story the numbers tell is blunt. Money clearly buys more campaigns, more branding, and more organisational growth. It is not, on its own, good at stopping suicide.
The mental health “cash cow”
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Men’s mental health is now a cash cow. There is always another awareness day, another colour to wear, a new challenge to join, or a corporate breakfast with a mental health ambassador and keynote speech.
Beards and moustaches become donation funnels. Footy clubs and workplaces become branded backdrops. Social feeds fill with carefully crafted posts about “starting the conversation”, often posted by organisations that do not frequently disclose how much they spend on marketing or how much ends up in executive salaries and reserves. The man in real trouble is often portrayed as a story, a statistic, or a campaign hook within this system. Once the campaign ends, he returns to the same challenges of long waits, unaffordable therapy, shame, silence, and isolation.
The financials make the cow visible. These charities openly celebrate global growth and long-term investment funds, explaining that only about three-quarters of every donated dollar is available for programs after admin and fundraising take their cut. One Australian charity discloses multi-million dollar executive remuneration pools while relying heavily on volunteers to staff its phone lines. Another spends the vast bulk of its income on running the campaign itself, staff, events, marketing, and “conversation convoys”, not on direct crisis support or material help for the people its message reaches.
None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual in the charity world. But when the product being promoted is “saving men from suicide”, it can appear troubling to see multi-million dollar surpluses and six-figure executive packages alongside families who cannot afford a single ongoing therapy session after a crisis. Why isn’t all this money working?
If funding alone could reduce male suicide, Australia might no longer be grappling with this issue. However, challenges remain, as much of the funding may not be directed in ways or to the depth needed to have the greatest impact.
First, it is overwhelmingly tied up in awareness and branding, not in the messy, long-term work of healing. Campaigns like RUOK? have saturated the country to the point where “Are you okay?” has become a reflex slogan rather than a genuine question backed by the capacity to respond. People know the words. They do not know what to do if the answer is “No, I am not.” A day of conversation without structure can actually make the pain sharper. You disclose, someone panics or freezes, and you learn it was never really safe to speak.
Second, the funding flows are still organised around systems, not stories. Governments and big donors back entities that can produce glossy reports, neat outcome frameworks, and KPI friendly numbers. They reward scale, brand recognition, and the ability to manage risk. What they do not know how to fund is the quiet, unglamorous work of sitting beside a man who is completely shattered and staying there for months or years. That work does not produce simple metrics or viral campaigns. It produces human beings slowly coming back to life.
Third, the system is built on the distance from the pain it describes. Decisions about where money goes are typically made by boards, executives, consultants, and bureaucrats who may care deeply but have not personally lived through the kind of sustained suicidality, childhood trauma, or abuse they are talking about. They commission research, they survey “stakeholders”, they hold roundtables. But they do not put people with lived experience in charge. Without that, the money keeps circling the same safe orbit, awareness, training modules, brief interventions, and short-term projects. The men on the edge do not live in that orbit.
Money versus conversation, connection, and truth
When men talk about what actually kept them here, the stories rarely start with a campaign and almost never start with a grant. They start with a mate who refused to leave, a quietly persistent partner, a stranger on a helpline who really listened, or another survivor who said, “I know exactly where you are, I’ve been there.” These are not “awareness activities.” These are acts of connection.
Research is slowly catching up with what survivors have been saying for years. Peer-based and lived-experience-informed supports reduce isolation, increase help-seeking, and change how people relate to their own suicidal thoughts. Training rooted in the lived experience of suicide has been shown to increase knowledge and confidence without increasing distress, showing that carefully held real stories are not dangerous. They are powerful. These findings are not perfect or complete, but they point in one direction. Real, grounded work held by people who “get it” saves more lives than scripted, branded, and detached talk.
Meanwhile, the money machine keeps pushing “check in with a mate” soundbites without putting serious funding behind what needs to exist after the check-in, safe, ongoing spaces, long-term trauma work, stable housing, and peer workers who can walk with a man through the fallout from disclosure. The gap between the message and the material reality is where trust dies.
Lived experience isn’t a garnish, it’s the only way out
Australia’s own suicide-prevention policy world has started using the language of lived experience, but too often it is treated like a garnish, one story at an event, one seat on a board, one quote on a brochure. That is not lived experience leadership. That is lived experience decoration.
When people with lived experience talk about what they want, they are crystal clear.
They want to be in the room before decisions are made, not after.
They want control over funding priorities, not just a chance to comment on pre-written strategies.
They want services and campaigns to be built from the ground up around the realities of trauma, shame, masculinity, addiction, poverty, and abuse, not around what is comfortable for government and corporate partners.
National bodies and dedicated organisations have begun to spell out frameworks for genuinely embedding lived experience into suicide prevention systems, with tools to measure how deeply, or superficially, it is integrated. The direction is clear. Systems that are led by people who know suicide from the inside look and feel completely different. They are less polished, more honest, more uncomfortable, and more effective at building trust.
When men’s mental health is framed as a significant funding issue, perhaps the most meaningful response is not additional fundraising, but instead providing decision-making opportunities, resources, and influence to men who have experienced these challenges and understand which approaches are most helpful. Until this becomes standard practice, references to lived experience may continue to fall short of their potential.
What would it look like if the money followed the men?
Imagine if even a fraction of the money currently circulating through campaigns and branding were redirected to what men with lived experience say they need most. The landscape would change fast.
Instead of another awareness day, you would see:
Funded, properly paid peer workforces made up of men who have survived suicidality and trauma, trained and supported to walk alongside others in crisis for as long as it takes.
Trauma-informed services that understand childhood sexual abuse, institutional abuse, family violence, and complex PTSD not as side notes but as central drivers in male suicidality, with long-term therapy available regardless of income.
Community-controlled spaces, peer groups, men’s circles, and survivor hubs, where the rules are written by people who have been there, not by marketing departments and risk officers.
Integrated supports around housing, employment, legal issues, and family law, because lived experience will tell you that a man does not kill himself because he saw the wrong campaign. He kills himself when he can no longer see a way to live with everything collapsing around him.
These are not hypotheticals. Lived-experience groups around the country have published exactly this kind of agenda and are calling, loudly, for funding to follow it. The main reason it has not happened at scale is not a lack of evidence or ideas. It is a lack of willingness on the part of those currently controlling the money to let go.
Stop pretending money is the hero
The hardest, clearest line in all of this is simple. Money is not the hero of this story. Men don’t stay alive because an organisation raised another million. They stay alive because someone met them in the dark and did not turn away. Money can support that work, or it can smother it under branding, bureaucracy, and distance. Right now, too much of it is doing the latter.
If the system really cared more about men’s lives than men’s stories, it would:
Stop using suicide as a marketing hook unless there is real, funded, ongoing support behind every message.
Publish brutally honest breakdowns of where every donated dollar goes, not buried in footnotes, but on the front page. How much goes to executive pay, how much to marketing, how much to reserves, and how much to direct support or grants?
Put lived-experience-led organisations and peer programs at the front of the funding queue, even if they aren’t tidy, glossy, or “on brand”.
Until then, the question “Why isn’t the money working?” has a straightforward answer because the people who know what actually works are still being treated as case studies, not as leaders.
Men’s mental health does not need another cash-rich campaign that tells them to speak up in a system that cannot hold what they say. It needs men who have lived through hell to set the terms, design the responses, and hold the space. That is what will change the trajectory. Everything else is just noise, and while the noise grows louder, the funerals keep coming.
Read more from John Comerford
John Comerford, Author/Motivational Speaker
John Comerford is a leading advocate for men’s mental health and trauma recovery. A survivor of childhood sexual assault, he endured four decades of silence before, after a suicide attempt, beginning the hard work of confronting his past and rebuilding his life. He shares his story in “Tarzan Loves Jane,” a dark romantic comedy based on his experience, and created “Battle Armour: 25 Tools for Men’s Mental Health” to equip other men with practical support. Today, he speaks, writes, and leads with one message. Speak up. His mission is that no man suffers in silence.
