Therapist writing notes during a counseling session with men.

Why Men Die Alone: A Closer Look at Singapore’s Suicide Gap

A professional reflection by Jeffrey Pang, SAC Registered Counsellor, Sacred Space Counselling

There are two numbers from Singapore’s 2024 suicide data that I keep returning to.

The first: 65.8% of the 441 suicide deaths recorded in Singapore in 2024 were men. The second: 62.5% of the calls and texts received by the Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) crisis line came from women.

Sit with that for a moment. The group most likely to die by suicide is the group least likely to reach out for help before it happens.

This isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t unique to Singapore. But understanding why it happens — and why the size of the gap varies so dramatically across countries — tells us something important about what protects people, and what quietly puts them at risk.

The Local Picture

Singapore’s 2024 figures, released by SOS in July 2025, painted a sobering picture. Of 441 suicide deaths, 290 were men and 151 were women — a ratio of roughly 1.9 men for every woman. Suicide remained the leading cause of death for youths aged 10 to 29 for the seventh consecutive year, and became the second leading cause of death for adults aged 30 to 39, a group where deaths rose 50% year-on-year, from 66 in 2023 to 99 in 2024.

Meanwhile, SOS’s own crisis-line data tells a different story about who reaches out. Women, who accounted for about a third of suicide deaths, made up nearly two-thirds of crisis calls and texts. SOS attributes this to women’s greater willingness to seek help — often in response to pressures tied to caregiving and gender-based violence. Man, by contrast, were described as more socially isolated, more reserved about disclosing emotional distress, and more likely to use highly lethal methods when they did act.

That last point matters clinically. It’s not simply that men suffer less visibly. It’s that when male distress does surface, it often does so at a point where intervention is no longer possible.

The Global Context

Singapore’s gender gap sits at an interesting midpoint globally. In the United States, men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women. In South Korea and Japan, the ratio narrows to around two to one. Research published in EClinicalMedicine in 2024 examining suicide trends across dozens of countries found male-to-female ratios typically ranging from two to five, with the widest gaps in Western, high-income countries and narrower gaps in parts of Asia.

Singapore’s 1.9:1 ratio places it closer to the East Asian pattern than the Western one. This is worth pausing on. It suggests that the size of the gender gap in suicide isn’t fixed by biology alone — it moves with culture, economic structure, and the social permission (or lack of it) granted to different genders to express distress.

The China Exception

No discussion of suicide and gender across Asia is complete without China’s remarkable historical anomaly. Until the late 1990s, China was the only country in the world where female suicide rates exceeded male rates — a gender ratio of roughly 0.88, meaning more women died by suicide than men. This was driven almost entirely by young women in rural areas, who faced a combination of economic powerlessness, low social status, dependency on male family members, and — critically — easy access to a highly lethal method: agricultural pesticides.

As China urbanised rapidly between 1990 and 2017, that picture transformed. Economic development improved rural women’s autonomy and living conditions, pesticide-access restrictions reduced the lethality of impulsive attempts, and large numbers of young rural women migrated to cities. The gender ratio of suicide flipped, rising from 0.88 in 1990 to 1.56 by 2017 — moving China toward, though still below, the global male-dominant pattern.

The lesson embedded in China’s reversal is one I find clinically important: suicide gender ratios are not fixed truths about how men and women are wired. They are markers of social conditions — economic security, autonomy, access to lethal means, and permission to be in visible distress. Change those conditions, and the numbers move.

What This Means for Men in Singapore

In our work with men navigating compulsive sexual behaviour, pornography use, and betrayal trauma, we see a version of this pattern almost every week — not as a statistic, but as a posture in the room.

A man arrives having carried something alone for years. Not because he lacked people who might have cared. Because somewhere early — in his family, his school, his church, his workplace — he absorbed the lesson that struggling and being a capable man who provides were mutually exclusive. Asking for help was recoded, quietly and without anyone ever saying it outright, as a kind of failure.

Dr Sharon Lu, principal clinical psychologist at the Institute of Mental Health, noted in recent CNA coverage that suicide is “rarely due to a single cause” — it results from an interplay of biological, psychological, social, and cultural risk factors, compounded by a lack of resilience resources. For many Singaporean men, one of those missing resilience resources is something deceptively simple: they were never shown what it looks like, or sounds like, to ask for help before a crisis point.

This is not a call to pathologise men’s silence, nor to suggest women’s help-seeking is somehow easier or less costly — the data on gender-based violence underlying some of that outreach makes clear it often isn’t. It’s a call to notice that our systems — crisis lines, mental health services, faith communities, workplaces — are frequently built around a model of help-seeking that assumes the person in distress will initiate contact. For many men, that assumption doesn’t hold, and the cost of that gap is measured in lives.

What Faith Leaders, Employers, and Families Can Do

If the data tells us anything actionable, it’s this: waiting for men to speak up first is a strategy with a body count attached.

For churches and faith communities, this means building rhythms of check-in that don’t depend on a man volunteering that he’s struggling — small groups with real accountability, pastors trained to ask direct questions, sermon language that normalises struggle rather than only celebrating overcoming it.

For employers and HR teams, this means recognising that the 30-to-39 age bracket — Singapore’s fastest-rising risk group — is disproportionately populated by employees balancing career pressure, new parenthood, ageing parents, and financial strain simultaneously. Employee assistance programmes that are visible, destigmatised, and proactively offered matter more than programmes that exist only on paper.

For families and partners, this means understanding that a man’s silence is rarely the absence of struggle — it is often struggle wearing its most socially acceptable disguise. Gentle, repeated, non-confrontational check-ins tend to work better than a single dramatic conversation.

For men themselves, if any part of this resonates: the fact that reaching out hasn’t been modelled for you doesn’t mean it isn’t available to you now. A conversation with a counsellor, a doctor, a trusted friend, or a crisis line is not a departure from strength. It is very often where strength actually begins.

If you’re navigating compulsive sexual behaviour, betrayal trauma, or simply carrying more than you know how to name, you’re welcome to reach out for a free 30-minute consultation at sacredspacecounselling.org, or DM @sacred.space.counselling.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) is available 24 hours at 1-767, or via CareText.

References

Samaritans of Singapore (SOS). (2025, July 28). Suicide numbers in Singapore remain a concern, a notable increase among adults aged 30 to 39 [Press release]. sos.org.sg
Samaritans of Singapore (SOS). (2024, July 12). Suicide numbers decline in Singapore, but vigilance must continue [Press release]. sos.org.sg
Mothership.SG. (2026, July). 441 suicides in S’pore in 2024: Suicide the leading cause of death for those aged 10-29.
The Straits Times. (2025, August 14). The 30s Are Heavy: Understanding Suicide Among Singapore’s Young Adults.
Malay Mail, citing Channel NewsAsia. (2025, July 25). Burdened and burning out: Singaporeans in their 30s face rising suicide risk, say experts.
Our World in Data. (2025). Suicide rates are higher in men than women, based on WHO Global Health Estimates 2021.
EClinicalMedicine. (2024). Cross-country analysis of age-standardised suicide rate trends by sex, 1990–2020.
Statista/OECD. (2026). Suicide rates in selected countries as of 2024, by gender.
Tang, S., & Xiaowei, Q. (2013). Gender and suicide in rural China: Social and cultural factors. Sex Roles.
Wang, C. W., et al. (2022). Economic Development and Gender Ratio Change in Chinese Suicide Rates (1990–2017). International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
China CDC Weekly. (2023). Suicide Mortality by Place, Gender, and Age Group — China, 2010–2021.
Institute of Mental Health (IMH) Singapore commentary, cited in Channel NewsAsia coverage, July 2025.