Why Male Suicide Often Goes Unseen in Israel
A wide-ranging interview between clinical social worker and psychotherapist Shimon Aflalo and Eli Gothelf, host of the "Kikar FM" podcast on Kikar HaShabbat, examines male depression and suicide in Israel. Aflalo says about 500 people die by suicide in Israel each year, about 400 of them men, meaning men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women. He argues that many of the men at greatest risk look successful, calm, and fully functional, which makes their suffering easy to miss.
Aflalo describes what he calls "shiny depression," a state in which a person appears admired and high-performing while feeling empty, losing interest, sleeping poorly, and quietly withdrawing. Drawing on the literary "Richard Cory" example, he warns against retrospectively asking how a seemingly perfect life ended in suicide. He also urges careful language, saying that phrases like "succeeded in suicide" give the act a harmful sense of achievement. He cites the halachic tradition against eulogizing suicide victims, and the Werther effect, the copycat suicide phenomenon tied to a 200-year-old European novel that was later banned in countries including Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
One of the interview's central messages is that asking about suicide does not plant the idea. Aflalo says ordinary people, not just clinicians, often save lives simply by asking directly and not being afraid. He compares the question to opening a door in a room filled with toxic gas, allowing air in. He also recounts the story of Kevin Hines, who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and immediately realized, "I don't want to die," a pattern Aflalo says he has seen many times in therapy: people want the pain to stop, not life itself.
Gothelf then shares for the first time publicly that after October 7 he worked nearly 22 hours a day on emergency calls and operations, felt intensely needed, and later plunged into a void when the phone stopped ringing and his sense of value collapsed. Aflalo uses that story to show how men often define themselves by usefulness and work, so the loss of role can trigger deep emptiness. He says connection, not just diagnosis, helps, urging friends and family to say, "I see you a little differently today," instead of the routine "How are you?" He also tells parents, especially of boys leaving home for yeshiva or boarding school, to speak openly and gently about guilt, temptation, and failure, because he does not expect schools or rabbis to handle it alone. Aflalo closes with two main corrections to the public conversation, talking about suicide does not encourage it, and a suicidal person does not want to die, they want unbearable pain to end. The article ends by directing readers in crisis to Eran's 24-hour hotline, 1201.
