Men commit 80 per cent of suicides in the country. In Ontario, suicides account for more injury-related deaths among men — about 800 each year — than any other category.

Why do men kill themselves? One factor that statistics point to is a significant connection between these suicides and divorce. The national suicide rate among divorced men was 41.2 per 100,000, according to a 1995 Statistics Canada report, the most recent of its kind. This is about four times the overall national suicide rate and more than twice as high as the rate for single or married men. The figure excludes Quebec, which has the highest suicide rate among divorced men in the country, 46.6 per 100,000.

Despite the numbers in the report, which was not conducted to make any specific connections, there has been no research since to explore the relationship between male suicide and divorce.

"We find that marriage and family is a protective factor, more so for men than women," says psychiatrist Paul Links, chair of the suicide studies program at the University of Toronto. "Difficult divorces or loss of children certainly fit the profile of loss that leads to suicide."

Divorced men are vulnerable to physical illness as well: They are more likely to die of natural causes than those who remain married, according to a U.S. study published this week. Of 10,904 men who were married at the beginning of the study, those who stayed married were less likely to die from a number of causes, especially cardiac disease, than those who divorced, the study found.

Links recognizes the potential connection between male suicide and divorce, but he's reluctant to isolate divorce as the sole factor responsible for the high suicide rate among men. "It's usually not one event that leads to suicide," he says. "One event, such as a divorce, might serve as a trigger, but it's usually a series of problems that lead to suicide."

That was the case with Bob Laplante, who tried to take his life 18 months after separating from his wife in 1993. His brother stopped him and psychiatrists later told Laplante that his depression could be traced to events much earlier in his life.

"The separation and the guilt after it was what pushed me over the edge, but I had been eating pills, tranquilizers and Valium, like candy for years," says Laplante, 43. "My doctors said my depression, when I started drinking and taking drugs, goes back to the death of my father when I was 15."

Laplante says the guilt over abandoning his wife and child for a life of drugs and alcohol eventually became too much to bear. After his first suicide attempt, he walked in and out of doctors' offices for five years, collecting a shopping list of antidepressants, tranquilizers and other drugs that allowed him to carelessly self-medicate.

Unable to find help beyond the growing collection of drugs doctors prescribed, Laplante again tried to commit suicide last year. "Luckily I threw up after taking a handful of pills and then passed out."

In September, after doctors finally recognized the severity of Laplante's condition, he was admitted into the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph. "They approached my treatment by looking at my drug and alcohol problem and my concurrent depression after my separation. It was the first time I was able to get real help. It was the only place that really offered counselling for someone in my situation. I haven't had a suicidal thought since I was released last October."

Finding help had also been difficult for divorcé Gerald Gauthier, who speaks of the isolation that forced him to deal with his depression alone.

"Suicide was one of the options that went through my mind. I seriously considered it," says Gauthier, 53, talking about the effects of his separation from his wife in 1995. He says it was the inability to see his children that sent him into a severe depression. "At one point I thought I'd be worth more dead than alive to my kids. I thought if I died at least my children could collect life insurance and would be able to move on. I don't know if my situation applies to people who have amicable divorces but certainly when there's a lot of conflict it's hard for men like me to go for support."

Though he admits to his own "male hang-up" about appearing weak, Gauthier says that when pushed to the edge of depression, divorced men are willing to reach out.

But there is almost no provincial or federal funding for social services specifically targeted at dealing with issues they face. No funds are provided for male divorce counselling, transitional shelter beds for divorced men (the Ontario government provides $12.4 million annually for emergency shelter beds for adult men in Toronto), temporary housing or telephone hotlines to meet the needs of men going through separation or divorce.

"There was nowhere to go," says Gauthier, who followed his ex-wife and children to Toronto after they left Montreal. "It was really hard to find help."

After his divorce in 1997, William Levy, 53, says he was perceived by many as a "deadbeat dad," the type of stigma he says is constantly perpetuated by media coverage of messy high-profile divorce cases and by pop-culture portrayals of divorced men.

"The moment you get a divorce, men become the pariah of society," says Levy. "Why did I nearly take my life several times? Because they took my kids from me."

The problem, Levy says, is that there are plenty of "deadbeat dads" out there who give a bad name to divorced men who truly do feel helpless and unworthy, unable to mend their most important relationships. He says that when responsible fathers are painted with the same dark strokes, the effect only compounds their despair.

When Darrin White, a railway engineer from Prince George, B.C., hanged himself two years ago, his suicide was portrayed by the media in two ways: one columnist showed little sympathy for the divorced father of four who lobbied, unsuccessfully, in court to have his child support payments reduced. A news story depicted the death of a man who felt isolated and helpless in a country that continues to fail the nearly 3,000 men who commit suicide each year.

After many disparaging reports in the media, White's 14-year-old daughter Ashlee wrote to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien: "I know my father was a good man and a good father .... He obviously reached a point where he could see that justice was beyond his reach and for reasons that only God will know, decided that taking his life was the only way to end his suffering."

Collingwood-based author and libertarian Wendy McElroy, editor of ifeminists.com, says if society, particularly the legal system, doesn't recognize the relationship between male suicide and divorce, the numbers will rise.

"There has been very little research to find out how alienated men feel after a complicated divorce and after losing custody in courts. But when you go through the research that's there, you come across story after story about men who wrote notes about their divorces or were clutching court orders while they committed suicide," says McElroy, whose anthology Liberty For Women: Freedom And Feminism For The 21st Century, will be published this year.

"The men's movement is at the same stage as feminism was in the '60s. There needs to be more societal support for men's issues, funding for services that have done so much to help women. And men, rightfully so, are now looking at family courts and saying there's something that's procedurally wrong with a system that has swung so far in favour of women. There seems to be a precipitous increase in male suicides within countries that have adopted this feminist model of family law."

Richard Stone, a lawyer who practises family law and his wife Paula Stone, who manages her husband's firm in Toronto, agree with McElroy. They have dealt with dozens of male clients over the past two decades who have fallen into depression after painful divorce and custody cases.

"One case," says Paula Stone, "involved a child who wasn't even born and the mother said the ex-husband couldn't have anything to do with the child, but expected and got full child support from her ex after their child was born. The anxiety and the alienation imposed on these gentlemen is extreme. They become very depressive."

Richard Stone says family law has changed drastically over the past two decades. "Women can reopen a spousal support case any time. It's very rare, if the wife doesn't want to give up custody, that men will be granted much more than visitation rights. For fathers who were involved very closely with the raising of their kids, it's really hard to get their heads around the fact that they'll only be able to see their kids every other weekend. They get really depressed and they have absolutely no place to go for help. I often suggest they seek counselling."

Laplante says his reluctance to seek help was difficult to overcome.

"I thought people would think I was weak-minded," he says, "and it was difficult to deal with the guilt. I knew I walked out on my family. I just didn't want to deal with it.

"The second time I tried to kill myself, after I woke up in my own vomit, I knew I had to get help. I thought being alive, even if I thought I was a bad husband and father, was a sign that I still deserve to live."