Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. 75% of all suicides are male. A man kills himself every 2 hours. 12 lives are lost every single day. The statistics go on and on. Despite this, suicide remains a stigmatised, silent killer which is not talked about in the media, and which is under-acknowledged by culture at large with people being unable to appreciate and unwilling to address the magnitude of the problem.

By creating 84 individual sculptures representing men who have lost their lives to suicide, and placing them atop the ITV Tower on London's Southbank, our campaign sought to break the silence around male suicide through channels that made the topic as real, human and visible as possible.

At the heart of the execution were 84 statues placed atop the ITV tower representing the 84 men who take their lives every single week. Across a series of workshops, bereaved families were guided in American street artist Mark Jenkins’ signature tape casting technique to produce the hyper-realistic figures, which were then clothed in drawn-shut hoodies to highlight the isolation often experienced by those facing depression and the way so many men suffer in silence. Through forging a partnership with ITV's This Morning who devoted a week of programming to Project 84 and male suicide, alongside films seeded on social media and a forcible PR approach, the campaign drove people to the CALM helpline/website to find much needed support. It also allowed them to scratch beneath the surface of the heartbreaking stories associated with each figure, and to sign the petition leading to a parliamentary discussion of the Project.

A week after launch, we had achieved more than 2.1 billion earned media reach. Furthermore, the campaign sparked conversation on social media with 170 million Twitter impressions, we received 220,000 signatures on the Change.org petition to the Secretary of Health, and most importantly, we received a 34% increase in demand for the helpline and webchat support in the 2 weeks following the launch compared to the weekly average prior.

Without any allocated media spend, we needed to find an innovative way to make the scale and severity of male suicide a national talking point, and then provide meaningful ways for the public to act in response, such as the Change.org grassroots government petition to make male suicide and bereavement a ministerial responsibility.

84 men a week take their own lives in the UK. That’s over four thousand lives that are tragically lost each year. Yet, no one was talking about it. This was unacceptable and we wanted to do something to change this. We wanted to create something that stopped people in their tracks and made them pay attention.