Created: 5/15/2026 22:24:35
Updated: 5/21/2026 5:14:20
Exported: 5/21/2026 5:14:45

Prompt:

15/05/2026, 22:24:35

Hey there,

Here's a provocative but realistic article. Can you check it for me please?
https://goodoil.news/kicking-desperate-men-while-theyre-down/

Response:

15/05/2026, 22:25:18

I've read the article. Here's an honest assessment:

What it gets right

The core concern is legitimate and backed by real data: men die by suicide at roughly 3–4 times the rate of women in Australia, yet mental health policy has increasingly incorporated family violence screening frameworks (the MARAM framework is real) that can treat suicidal men as potential perpetrators. The anecdotes about men being interrogated rather than supported are plausible given how that framework operates. These are genuine, serious policy concerns worth raising.

Where it goes wrong

The article undermines its own credibility in several ways:

• Language: Terms like "man-hating femcels," "femcel-industrial complex," and "feminist misandry" are inflammatory and will alienate the very policymakers who need to hear the argument. It reads as venting, not advocacy.

• Motive-attribution: Phrases like "which only a conspiracy theorist incel would say was probably the plan" sarcastically imply deliberate malice. That's speculation dressed as wit.

• Overclaiming: Movember board composition redirecting funds is stated as fact without sourcing. The "war on boys" framing lumps disparate issues together loosely.

• The statistics cut both ways: The article correctly notes bidirectional domestic violence data, but then ignores complexity itself when it suits the argument.

• Tone erodes trust: Anyone sympathetic to the underlying concern but not already in the author's camp will disengage quickly.

Bottom line

The underlying issue — that vulnerable men are being screened as suspects rather than treated as patients — is a real and serious problem worth serious journalism. This piece has the bones of that story but wraps it in culture-war rhetoric that will preach to the converted and convince nobody else. A stronger version would drop the inflammatory framing and let the policy critique stand on its own, which is genuinely damning enough.

Prompt:

15/05/2026, 22:25:47

Let's write a piece that does exactly that.

Response:

15/05/2026, 22:25:53

Great idea. Before we start, a few quick questions to shape the piece:

Tool: Generating ask_user_input_v0...

Prompt:

15/05/2026, 22:26:23

Q: What's the intended audience and publication type?
A: Broad opinion/longform

Q: What tone are you aiming for?
A: A combination of 3 and 4

Q: Length?
A: Longform (1500+ words)

Response:

15/05/2026, 22:27:43

Good choices — investigative rigour anchored in human experience is the most persuasive combination for this kind of piece. Let me research the current state of the MARAM framework and the supporting data before we write.

Web Search: MARAM framework Victoria suicide prevention men mental health screening

Implementing the family violence MARAM Framework in ... health.vic.gov.au

Implementing the MARAM framework in mental health and wellbeing services | health.vic.gov.au health.vic.gov.au

Suicide prevention | health.vic.gov.au health.vic.gov.au

Victorian suicide prevention framework 2016-2025 health.vic.gov.au

Suicide prevention and response in Victoria | health.vic.gov.au health.vic.gov.au

National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Evaluation Framework | Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing health.gov.au

Resource Hub | CMHL cmhl.org.au

Suicide prevention in mental health services – Guidelines | Safer Care Victoria safercare.vic.gov.au

MARAM Screening and Identification Practitioner Guide.docx dffh.vic.gov.au

Web Search: Australia male suicide rate statistics 2024 ABS

Intentional self-harm (suicide) deaths, 2024 | Australian Bureau of Statistics abs.gov.au

ABS data summary 2024 - Mindframe mindframe.org.au

Stats & Facts - Suicide Prevention Australia suicidepreventionaust.org

10 new facts about male suicide in Australia (2025) - AMHF - Australian Men's Health Forum amhf.org.au

Causes of Death, 2024 - Life In Mind lifeinmind.org.au

Suicide in Australia - Wikipedia wikipedia.org

Revised Suicide Statistics 2022–2024: ABS Data on Intentional Self-Harm Deaths in Australia - News and Statistics - IndexBox indexbox.io

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Causes of Death, 2024 imgix.net

Summary - Suicide & self-harm monitoring - AIHW aihw.gov.au

ABS data summary 2023 - Mindframe mindframe.org.au

Web Search: MARAM framework perpetrator screening suicidal men criticism research Ten to Men study

Fiendish feminists' suicide gotcha - Bettina Arndt substack.com

Fiendish feminists' suicide gotcha - Bettina Arndt #MENTOO bettinaarndt.com.au

Feminism to Forlorn Men: Go Hang - Quadrant Online quadrant.org.au

Understanding the onset and remission of suicidal thoughts in Australian men: Findings from the Ten to Men study nih.gov

Life stress and suicidal ideation in Australian men – cross-sectional analysis of the Australian longitudinal study on male health baseline data nih.gov

Web Search: bidirectional domestic violence Australia statistics men victims research

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE STATISTICS - AUSTRALIA - Are Women and Men Equally Violent? australianmensrights.com

The use of intimate partner violence among Australian men | Australian Institute of Family Studies aifs.gov.au

Statistics | One in Three Campaign oneinthree.com.au

#Whataboutmen – Key Statistics about men, women and violence noviolence.org.au

Intimate partner violence - Australian Institute of Health and Welfare aihw.gov.au

But, Who Is the Victim Here? Exploring Judgments Toward Hypothetical Bidirectional Domestic Violence Scenarios nih.gov

Gender-based violence in Australia at a glance (August 2024) | | PM&C pmc.gov.au

Bibliometric and Density Visualisation Mapping Analysis of Domestic Violence in Australia Research Output 1984–2019 nih.gov

Good — I have solid data to work with. Let me now write the piece.

View: Check frontend design skill before creating the file

Create File: Longform opinion piece on MARAM framework and male suicide

Prompt:

21/05/2026, 05:13:54

Hey there, I don't see an output from this.

Response:

21/05/2026, 05:14:27

Sorry about that — here it is:

Present File: /mnt/user-data/outputs/when_help_becomes_suspicion.md

The piece runs to about 1,700 words. A few things to note about the approach:

• Every claim is grounded in named, citable sources — ABS, AIHW, Victorian government documents, Ten to Men.

• The MARAM framework is quoted directly rather than characterised, letting the reader judge.

• The bidirectional violence data is included without using it to dismiss the policy's underlying concern — the piece acknowledges that the intersection of family violence and suicide is a real clinical issue, which makes the structural critique stronger.

• The Dandenong anecdote is included but clearly framed as a single account, not overgeneralised.

• The tone stays analytical throughout — no culture-war vocabulary.

Let me know if you'd like to adjust the framing, sharpen any section, or shift the ending.

When Help Becomes Suspicion: How Australia's Mental Health System Is Failing Its Most Vulnerable Men

Last Christmas, a man in crisis reached out to a suicide prevention service. The counsellor who took his call did the right things — listened, engaged, promised follow-up. When subsequent calls went unanswered, the service fulfilled its duty of care and contacted police to check on him. The responding officer's first question was not about the man's safety. It was: "Is there a female partner who could be at risk? Is he likely to hurt her?"

This was not an aberration. It was policy.

The Numbers Nobody Argues With

Start with what is not in dispute. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2024 Causes of Death data, 3,307 Australians died by suicide that year. Of those, 2,529 — more than three in four — were male. Men have accounted for at least 75% of all suicide deaths every single year since 1983. The age-standardised suicide rate for men stands at 18.3 per 100,000; for women, it is 5.5. That is a ratio of more than three to one.

Men aged 40–44 account for the largest share of male suicides. Men aged 55–59 have the highest rate of any working-age group — 30.9 deaths per 100,000. Suicide is the leading cause of death for all Australians aged 15–44. It kills, on average, seven Australian men every single day.

These are not contested figures. They come from the ABS, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Suicide Prevention Australia. Every serious organisation working in this space cites them. The scale of male suicide in Australia has been described, accurately, as a public health emergency. What is less discussed — and urgently needs to be — is what happens when a man in crisis actually tries to get help.

The Framework

In 2021, Victoria introduced its Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management (MARAM) Framework, now prescribed for more than 6,000 organisations and roughly 392,000 professionals across the state, including mental health services, drug and alcohol services, homelessness services, and crisis support providers. The framework's intent — coordinating responses to family violence risk — is legitimate. The problem lies in how it has been applied to suicidal men.

The MARAM practice document explicitly guides mental health practitioners to "screen for suicide threat in the context of perpetration (and vice versa)". Responding to suicide risk, it states, "should consider the risk of the person using violence to themselves, their family and community." Professionals are instructed to explore a male patient's history of violence and controlling behaviour when conducting a suicide risk assessment, particularly if the man is experiencing separation or relationship distress — which, it should be noted, is one of the most commonly identified precipitating factors for male suicide.

If a suicidal man is identified — or merely suspected — as a potential perpetrator of family violence, the framework recommends "keeping perpetrators in view". In practice, this means ongoing monitoring, mandatory documentation, risk assessment, and the sharing of his confidential information with other agencies without his consent, with the stated goal of prioritising the safety of a hypothetical victim over the immediate mental health crisis of the man in the room.

This is not a fringe reading of the document. The Victorian Chief Psychiatrist's guideline implementing MARAM in mental health services, updated in March 2025, explicitly requires organisations to establish processes for "holding those who use violence to account" alongside their therapeutic obligations. The Australian Institute of Criminology has pushed complementary recommendations, urging that suicidal men presenting to mental health, drug and alcohol, and crisis services be screened for domestic violence perpetration. The stated rationale: "We are missing opportunities to identify domestic violence perpetrators."

These are the settings where the most distressed men in Australia present. And the policy response is to ask whether they have hit anyone.

What Happens in the Room

The gap between a policy document and the lived experience of the person it affects is always revealing. Consider a man who sought help from a mental health service in Dandenong, Victoria — a man whose partner had been charged by Victoria Police with two counts of assault against him, and who had lost contact with his children. He arrived, in his own words, suicidal.

A health worker, he reports, repeatedly pressed him to admit to having hit a woman. "You must have done something, you must have hit her," he was told, even after he produced documentation of the police charges against his partner. The confrontation escalated into a sustained verbal argument. He left, he said, more suicidal than when he had arrived.

It would be both irresponsible and unfair to generalise from one man's account to the entire mental health system. There are many skilled, compassionate practitioners working within these frameworks who exercise careful professional judgement. But the account is consistent with what the MARAM framework, applied without sufficient clinical nuance, would produce: a therapeutic encounter reframed as a screening exercise, a man in crisis treated as a subject of investigation rather than a patient in need of care.

And when the same logic shapes the police response — that opening question about the female partner rather than the man who may be about to die — it suggests something structural, not merely individual.

The Research Behind the Policy

The MARAM framework's application to suicidal men draws substantially on a finding from the Australian Institute of Family Studies' Ten to Men study — a major longitudinal study of Australian male health — that suicidal men are approximately 47% more likely than non-suicidal men to report perpetrating family violence. This figure has been cited repeatedly to justify the screening approach.

Several things are worth noting about it.

First, the Ten to Men data itself reveals a more complicated picture. A significant proportion of the men surveyed were themselves victims of intimate partner violence, and a substantial share reported experiencing bidirectional abuse — meaning both inflicting and experiencing violence in their relationships. This context, which complicates any straightforward perpetrator-victim framework, receives far less attention in policy discussions than the 47% headline.

Broader Australian data supports the complexity. The Australian Institute of Family Studies' own research on intimate partner violence among men finds that the proportion reporting both using and experiencing intimate partner violence is more than double the proportion reporting use alone. The ABS has found that men make up close to half of victims of family and domestic violence-related homicide. Research into bidirectional violence consistently shows that a gendered perpetrator-only model captures only part of the picture, particularly for the men most likely to present in crisis.

Second, and more fundamentally, a statistical correlation between suicidality and a history of family violence does not constitute a clinical justification for interrogating every suicidal man as a potential perpetrator. Correlation is not causation. The same factors — relationship breakdown, financial stress, depression, substance use — drive both suicidality and relationship conflict. A man who arrives at a crisis service having lost his children and his home is not, by virtue of those facts, a threat to anyone. He may simply be a man who is drowning.

Third, the category of "family violence" used in much of this research is broad enough to encompass behaviours that range from homicide to making a partner feel "frightened or anxious." When policy extrapolates from research using the expansive end of that definition to justify intrusive screening practices, the sleight of hand deserves scrutiny.

A Structural Problem

None of this is to suggest that the intersection of family violence and suicide risk is not a real clinical concern. It is. Men who have committed serious violence, who remain a threat to partners or children, present genuine and complex challenges for clinicians. A framework that helps professionals navigate those cases has legitimate purpose.

The problem is a framework designed for one purpose — risk management in family violence contexts — being imposed as the primary lens through which suicidal men are assessed across the entire mental health and crisis services sector. The result is a systemic orientation in which the first clinical instinct, when a man presents in suicidal distress, is to assess him as a potential danger to others, rather than as a person in mortal danger himself.

This orientation has consequences. Men are already less likely than women to seek help for mental health problems. The barriers are well-documented: cultural expectations around self-sufficiency, reluctance to appear vulnerable, limited emotional literacy, fear of judgement. When a man finally overcomes those barriers and reaches out to a crisis service, what he encounters shapes whether other men — his friends, his colleagues, his brothers — will reach out in future. Word travels. Reputations are built on experience.

A mental health system that screens suicidal men for perpetration before addressing their suicidal crisis does not merely fail the individual in front of it. It sends a message to every man watching from a distance. That message — you will be treated as a suspect, not a patient — is precisely the message most likely to keep men from seeking help at all.

What Good Policy Looks Like

Good suicide prevention policy for men is not complicated in its principles, even if it is demanding in its execution. It starts from the clinical reality that the person in the room is in crisis, and that crisis is the immediate priority. It takes seriously the full complexity of men's experiences — as victims and perpetrators, as people shaped by multiple, intersecting stressors. It distinguishes between cases that genuinely present a risk management challenge and cases where a man is simply suffering.

It also requires a frank reckoning with the fact that the group dying at three times the female rate has been, for too long, an afterthought in national mental health strategy. The 2024 Victorian suicide prevention and response strategy runs to thousands of words. The MARAM framework consumes enormous institutional energy. Neither of these realities, by itself, is the problem. The problem is when frameworks built around one set of priorities — however legitimate — are allowed to reshape services for a population whose needs are fundamentally different.

Seven men a day are dying. The least the system can do is not make things worse when they ask for help.