I ring H, an old friend. “Thanks for the party” I say. I’d been to Dublin the previous weekend to go to her 40th. H was born the same week as my parents’ wedding; I came along nine months later. H said at the party that it was like she came along first to check if the coast was clear, and then gave me the nod. I was touched by that.

“You’re welcome. What you up to?” she says. “Sitting in front of a blank screen, so I thought I’d ring you instead.” Laughs. “Deadline?” “Yes.” “Write about 40th birthday parties. That madness.” “OK”.

I’m dreading the ritual of my 40th, putting on a show and fretting that people get on and that there’s enough food and the music is right and there are no awkward silences and not getting despondent if people don’t turn up and am I an OK human being? I’ve spent my 30s in London – my life is split, and trying to muster up a party-sized crowd in either city doesn’t seem probable. I’m resigning myself to an anti-climax – I had a lovely time on my 39th, a table-sized group of friends in a little pub with great music. Can I have that again, please, without the fuss?

However, there is a deeper thread to turning 40. I’ve made it this far. H and I, both intense passionate people, have known dying moments in our lives – and, for all sorts of complex reasons and happy accidents and sheer bloody-mindedness, we’re here to tell the tale. And we do so, in our own different ways. That’s worth celebrating.

And then I remember that I have a newspaper clipping, from the day of her party, in my pocket about suicide killing more people in Ireland than in road accidents.

Now this isn’t a standard “remember the

starving children in Africa and count your lucky stars” kind of sermon. Because it’s not about famine or war, it’s about something ineffable, that thread that keeps us wanting to stay on this earth, when we have the basics of food and housing and health. We cut that thread because it’s too painful to be tethered here, or because it’s the only decisive or meaningful act we can imagine doing. We can judge it to be the result of mental illness, misdiagnosed or ignored; or we can see it as a subversive act, or a desperate act. Or even a political/religious act – the most powerful of all. But the trouble with successful suicides is that we can’t ask the perpetrator what their life was like before they ended it. If we’re “lucky” we’ll have a suicide note as a vicious clue, to let us know the level of their rage and despair and isolation and hurt.

It’s three years since I started being a counsellor, and I feel I can speak to this subject from some experience, both from my own dark nights of the soul and of listening to my clients speak of theirs. Contrary to popular myth, when people mention suicide it often is a precursor to some attempt to end their lives. But, as always, hindsight is 20:20, and friends may kick themselves that they didn’t pay attention to a black joke, an odd farewell, or a hunch that something was wrong, as they stand around the graveside, but responsibility for suicide rests, ultimately, with the one who does it.

As counsellors/therapists, we can act as agents for life, if clients wish to share with us their despair and desire to not live any more – but we cannot take responsibility for them. It’s a tough line, because relatives will often look to blame someone after a suicide, and a therapist is fair game – it is imagined that we are the ones who can do something when hearing someone’s existential pain. We can but listen and, if it gets really rough, with their permission, contact a doctor; but a death wish is a death wish, and medicating and restraining a soul who has made its mind up to leave is often a delaying tactic for the inevitable. But intervention at any age can bring about transformation, if the cry for help is heard and listened to, if existential isolation is acknowledged by another human being, the paradox of healing.

It is laudable that there should be concern around the hundreds of people taking their own lives every year in Ireland. (484 in 2001.) The figure is probably much more than that – a friend of mine in a large hospital in the North-West of Ireland says that she sees around one suicide a day in the morgue, which suggests that only around an eighth are covered by government statistics.

But talk of suicide prevention is another matter. As a man, and someone involved in men’s issues for some time, I am inclined to focus on the world, imagined or recorded, of the suicidal man, as opposed to the suicidal woman. I know the impotence, the terror, of not being able to describe what feelings are going on inside, and the dread of telling another soul something that is heavy and scary. Even as a gay man it makes little difference sometimes – gay or straight, men often find it intolerable to speak about what they feel. It strikes me that this is at the heart of suicide prevention for men – for emotional literacy can and should be taught to young men, to make up for what seems to be a mixture of genetic and cultural biases – in exactly the same way as self-defence can and should be taught to young women, to empower them, to redress the imbalances.

For many reasons, women who attempt to kill themselves appear to do it more as a deep cry for help, which, hopefully, gets heard; someone told me recently of her “melodramatic” youth, when she was in and out of hospital with overdoses and cuts to her wrists – she felt trapped, she felt she needed someone to notice how much pain she was in, and, in the end, it worked. She looks back with compassion at her troubled past, and is fully engaged with life as an adult now. Men, however, tend to succeed with their suicides – and therefore there doesn’t seem to be any redemption or compassion possible later in life. We are the ones left to wonder what we could have done to prevent their loss to us.

There are clues. Addiction is one. If suicide is acute death wish, addiction is chronic. Those who suicide are more often than not heavy drinkers, or addicted to something or other. Addiction is escape – and by becoming used to escaping our feelings repeatedly, temporarily, perhaps it makes it easier to escape our feelings permanently.

Irish men, culturally, use alcohol to get in touch with our feelings. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 – for expressing feelings while drunk may feel like catharsis, as if we’re getting things flowing, as if we’re manfully getting things off your chest – the truth is that, in time, the exercise, the ritual of drowning our sorrows, ceases to work, and our despair increases. No one really listens when you’re drunk. Crying over a pint or five is masturbatory – it feels good at the time, but it’s not reaching anyone else. And it’s isolation that is the key to understanding the sort of despair that leads to suicide – the isolation of not being heard.

Perhaps it’s my narcissistic belief that supports this therapeutic approach to suicide – ie if I’m a good enough listener, then my client won’t kill himself. It’s bollocks, of course. But I do know the relief of finally talking to someone who understood the prison I had built for myself – and that relief is a life-enhancing surge that still bobs me along to this day.

We men don’t talk about our “negative” feelings – we mock those who do, especially when we were at school. We soldier on and are kind and good-natured, mostly – but we don’t like to talk about how we’re feeling, really. We’d rather tell a good story that makes people laugh – and, occasionally, if we’re lucky, we’ll catch up with a really close friend who can ask “how are things?” in a way that is a real inquiry, not a bland greeting. We men are hopelessly inadequate in bracing ourselves for the possibility that when we ask how someone is, we might get a dark truth, something deep and uncomfortable. We laugh it off, tell each other to cheer up, snap out of it, have another drink, don’t be feeling sorry for yourself, don’t let the team down. At all costs keep the pebble bouncing along the surface of the water, and don’t let it rest, for it will sink if it does. And that’s scary, for we as men are not used to coping with deep feelings.

Unless they’re about Roy Keane.