Samke Dladla
9 November 2026
Every November, moustaches start appearing across South Africa, an unlikely but effective symbol of a far more serious conversation. Movember has become known globally for its focus on prostate and testicular cancer, but in South Africa, the campaign has increasingly become a lifeline for a crisis that is too often described as invisible: men’s mental health.
The statistics are difficult to read past. South Africa ranks eighth among countries with the highest suicide rates in the world, according to World Health Organisation data. In the most recent year for which figures are available, of the 13,776 recorded suicides in South Africa, 10,861, more than three-quarters, were men. Men in this country are, by some estimates, four to five times more likely to die by suicide than women, a gap that points not to men suffering less, but to men suffering more silently.
Martlé Keyter, Chief Executive Officer: Operations at the Motor Industry Staff Association (MISA), has been blunt about what these numbers mean in practice. “Men are 4 to 5 times more likely to die by suicide compared to women,” she has said, describing the crisis as one the country can no longer afford to look away from. MISA, representing more than 75,000 members in the male-dominated retail motor industry, has taken to hosting an annual Bikers Rally for Men’s Mental Health as one small, practical way of opening a conversation that workplaces have too often avoided.
Part of what makes this crisis so persistent is how deeply it is tied to ideas about masculinity itself. Dr Schalk Burger, a clinical coach at Kena Health, has pointed to the traditional male gender role as a central barrier, describing a reluctance to talk about or even acknowledge medical issues for fear of seeming unmasculine. Boys are raised, from an early age, with the message that pain should be endured quietly rather than voiced, that vulnerability is a liability rather than something human. By the time that boy becomes a man facing depression, anxiety or overwhelming stress, the habit of silence is often already deeply ingrained.
The consequences of that silence show up in more than suicide statistics alone. Mental health professionals have linked untreated distress in men to rising rates of substance abuse, domestic violence and road rage, patterns of behaviour that are sometimes the only outward sign that something is deeply wrong. When emotional pain has no accepted outlet, it does not disappear; it tends to resurface elsewhere, often at cost to the people closest to the person struggling.
There are signs of change, even if slow. Movember campaigns in South Africa have expanded well beyond moustache-growing to include awareness walks, fundraising for men’s health charities, and, increasingly, direct promotion of helplines like the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG). Suicide survivor Daryl Brown, who now lives in Cape Town after surviving a suicide attempt years ago in London, has used his own story to reach other men struggling in silence, offering a message that is simple but often exactly what is needed: you’re not alone.
That message matters because so much of the crisis is rooted in isolation, the belief that no one else could possibly understand, or that admitting struggle will change how others see you. Breaking that isolation does not require every man to become fluent in therapeutic language overnight. It can start smaller: a friend asking a genuine second time how someone is really doing, a workplace that treats a mental health day the same as a physical one, a family that makes space for a son, husband or father to say he is not okay.
This Movember, the moustaches are still worth growing, and the funds they raise still matter. But the deeper work, the work of dismantling a culture that has taught generations of South African men that silence is strength, is the work that will determine whether next year’s suicide statistics look any different. That work does not end when November does.
