press
the numbers, with their sources.
Last updated 3 September 2026. Everything here is already published elsewhere on this site with its working shown. If you are on deadline, the boilerplate and the figures are the two sections you want.
contact
press@isjamesok.org. It is a small inbox, so put “deadline” and the time in the subject line and it will get looked at first. If it is genuinely urgent and we cannot help you in time, we would rather tell you that quickly than go quiet.
if you are writing about suicide
Please follow the Samaritans media guidelines (2026 edition, PDF). No method, no location, nothing that frames a death as a solution or as inevitable, and a route to help alongside anything that discusses risk. We follow them everywhere — this site, the evidence map, and social. The lyrics on the record were written to them, and we have asked Samaritans’ Media Advisory Service to review them; we will say so here when that is done.
We will ask for signposting in any piece we contribute to. It is not a condition we can enforce, and we will still help you if you say no — but we will ask every time. The wording, if you want it:
“When life is difficult, Samaritans are here – day or night, 365 days a year. You can call them for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.”
Samaritans also provide a free embeddable video for exactly this — the embed code is on their 10 top tips for reporting suicide page, alongside the same signposting wording. Their Media Advisory Service will also give any journalist a free second opinion on a piece — worth using, and not just for pieces about us.
two things to know before you ask
echo//exit stays anonymous. The record, ctrl+drift+delete, is by an anonymous artist — no face, no name. An interview is possible on that basis: anonymised, and arranged through press@isjamesok.org rather than direct. Please do not go looking. The anonymity belongs to a real person, not to a campaign.
Who wrote this, and who advises it. The evidence map and the method were written by people who are not clinicians and not researchers. The reasoning is ours and so are the mistakes, and it should be read that way. Clinical and academic advisers are coming into the work now and are shaping what happens next. What does not yet exist is formal clinical governance: a named review process with the authority to stop something. Building that is a first-year task rather than a box already ticked, and we will name the people and the process here as each is confirmed.
status — please get this bit right
isjamesok? is a charity in formation. There is no registered charity number yet, no trustee board, and no registered office. Calling us “a registered charity” or “a mental health charity” would be wrong on both counts — we are not registered, and we are not a service. We do not take disclosures, we are not a helpline, and nothing we publish is medical advice. isjamesok? is currently a small number of people, and it is honest about which parts of this are not yet built.
boilerplate, to paste
One line.
isjamesok? is a UK charity in formation campaigning to change how men get asked how they are — because the usual way of asking is built to get a no.
One paragraph.
isjamesok? is a UK charity in formation. Its argument is narrow and evidenced: most people ask a man how he is in a form that invites him to say he is fine, and asked openly instead, roughly four times as many men tell the truth. It publishes a six-move method for asking, free and unlicensed, alongside a public map of the evidence underneath it — including the claims the sector repeats that do not survive checking, and the places where the evidence for its own plans runs out.
the figures, with sources
Use these rather than the ones in circulation. Each is on the evidence map with its limitations attached, and the limitations matter — several are case series with no control group, which means they describe what services saw, never what caused it.
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 9.7% → 38.1% | Disclosure of suicidal ideation when asked in a closed, negatively-phrased way, against asked openly. A ratio of 3.93× — we round it to “four times” in headlines and would rather you used the exact pair. | McCabe et al. 2017, UK consultations, observational |
| 91% | Men who died by suicide who had been in contact with at least one frontline service. 82% primary care or A&E; 50% mental health services. They showed up. | NCISH, male suicides aged 40–54, 2017, case series |
| ⅓ / ¾ | Men as roughly a third of talking-therapy referrals and about three-quarters of suicides. Once they attend, their outcomes match women’s. | NHS Talking Therapies; ONS |
| 3,983 | Men a year in England, three-year mean. This is the defensible urgency claim — absolute burden, not a trend. | ONS; House of Commons Library CBP-7749 |
One figure we deliberately leave out of this table: means restriction is the best-evidenced category in suicide prevention, and it has the weakest applicability to the modal British male death. The Strong grade for means restriction was earned on firearms, pesticides, bridges and analgesic pack sizes. None of those is the dominant route in British men, and in the community that route involves nothing purchasable, licensable or barrier-able. We are not going to set out the specifics here — the reasons are in the Samaritans guidelines above — and if you need the underlying epidemiology for a specialist piece, ask us and we will point you at the primary sources rather than pre-digest them.
four things most coverage gets wrong
Not a complaint — these are all easy to repeat in good faith, and we repeated some of them ourselves. Twelve of them are set out in full on the evidence map, with sources, including the ones that correct this charity’s own first framing.
- “Male suicide is a rising epidemic.” The male age-standardised rate in England and Wales fell from 19.2 per 100,000 in 1981 to 17.6 in 2024. The honest framing is stalled progress and a widening sex ratio inside a slowly falling total. Registration-year counts cannot carry a trend statement in either direction — only 38.7% of 2024 registrations happened that year.
- “78% of men say they’re fine when they’re not — so ask twice.” The 78% is a 2018 campaign poll of hypothetical self-reported behaviour, not a study. “Ask twice” has never been tested. This is the correction that changed our own instruction from “ask twice” to “ask openly”.
- “Men don’t seek help.” Not once they reach a clinician: the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2023/24 found no difference on any treatment measure. And 91% of the men who died had already been in contact with a service. The failure is at the front door and in the referral, not in the consulting room.
- “Someone should build a tool to spot who’s most at risk.” NICE guideline NG225 says plainly: do not use risk assessment tools and scales to predict future suicide. Around 80% of people who died while in service contact had been rated low or no risk.
what we won’t do
- Put a bereaved family, or anyone currently unwell, in front of a camera or a notebook. We will not supply case studies of people in crisis, and we will not go and find you one.
- Discuss method or means, in any detail, in any format.
- Claim the record prevents anything. The only randomised trial of a song written to get men talking found no effect. Music gets people here; what happens next is the charity’s job.
- Give you a number we cannot source, or round one in a direction that flatters us. If you ask something we do not know, the answer will be that we do not know.
images and assets
There is no press pack yet, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. What exists today is the wordmark and the social share images already on this site.
Coming shortly: the logo in every format and colour version, at print resolution; a set of shareable name cards; and typographic plates. Not coming: photographs of people. Emotive imagery carries a real contagion risk — it is Samaritans’ fifth tip — and the stock shot of a man with his head in his hands is both the sector default and the least compliant image available. Everything we produce will be typographic or graphic. If you need something and none of it works, ask before reaching for a library.
In the meantime, if you need a logo at print resolution, a specific crop, or anything else, email press@isjamesok.org and say what dimensions and format — it is quicker for both of us than a zip of the wrong sizes.
There are no photographs of a spokesperson because the record’s artist is anonymous and there is no one else to photograph yet. When that changes we will say so.
The wordmark is isjamesok? — lower case, no spaces, question mark included. The middle word is a blank you put a name in; “james” is the sample, not the name. Whichever word sits in the blank is violet and underlined, and it reads as one word, so please keep it closed up. Please keep the question mark.
Licence. Everything written on this page is free to quote. The wordmark and share images on this site are free to use in editorial coverage of isjamesok? — please do not alter the colours, redraw the mark, or use any of it to imply we endorse a product, a campaign or an organisation.
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