Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the United Kingdom.

84 men take their lives every single week.

More men die from their own hands than through cancer, or heart problems, or car accidents.

It costs the British economy over £20 million every single day.

But it’s an issue nobody wants to talk about.

This stigmatises the issue further, driving men in crisis underground – leaving them feeling like there’s nowhere to turn.

In our eyes, this is fucking unacceptable and demands change.

We needed to create an idea that:

1. Incited the nation to talk. Success was nothing less than a national conversation around male suicide. We would measure this through the quantity of headlines and earned media created.

2. Forced the government to change. Conversation wasn’t enough. We wanted to affect systemic change, as measured through a concrete change in governmental policy.

3. Stopped more men from killing themselves. None of the above would constitute success if it didn’t result in fewer men dying by their own hands. We would measure this through an increase in overall calls to the C.A.L.M. helpline & an increase in suicides directly prevented on the helpline itself.

The figures behind male suicide rates in the UK are as stark as they are offensive.

In the last ten years, there have been 47,250 suicides.

45,000 have been male.

4,362 men killed themselves last year.

That’s f**king shameful.

But here’s the issue.

People can’t process a number like 4,362.

Until you explain that 4,362 equates to another man killing himself every 2 hours, you can’t grasp what that number means.

There’s a neuro-scientific explanation.

Our brains process small numbers accurately, and large numbers only approximately.

So we can’t comprehend large quantities.

Any communication reliant on depicting the thousands of men lost to suicide annually would simply be too big to process.

But if we went too small, we’d lack the visual impact required to convey the crisis with enough severity to demand attention and discussion.

So we defined a ‘goldilocks’ figure: large enough to capture scale, small enough to be understood in devastatingly real, human terms.

That figure was 84: the number of men who kill themselves, every single week.

Our challenge was to visualize this in the most incendiary and non-traditional way possible.

In partnership with This Morning, we created Project 84.

The heart of the idea was to place 84 male statues on the top of the ITV tower, in what became a haunting, unmissable, and critically understandable visualisation of the number of men who commit suicide every single week.

The statues were made with the help of bereaved families, and acclaimed street artist Mark Jenkins. This provided a wealth of real stories capturing not just the tragedy of male suicide, but the optimism, defiance and recovery of those left behind.

The entire campaign played out on This Morning – ITV’s flagship show. We didn’t just put the issue on top of an unmissable tower, we put it (and critically, the C.A.L.M. helpline) in the home of millions of real people.

Simultaneously, a petition went live on Change.org, calling on government to deliver ministerial responsibility for suicide prevention and bereavement support.

Project 84 incited national conversation.

Google searches for male suicide reached an historic high.

And the campaign received (inter)national media attention.

Created a watershed moment for suicide prevention policy.

The petition received 390,000 signatures.

Project 84 was debated during PMQs, resulting in the appointment of the UK’s first ever Suicide Prevention Minister.

Data from CALM’s helpline shows Project 84 demonstrates more men received the help they needed.

Calls for March increased by 41%.

Through conversation analysis, CALM can identify with certainty the number of suicides prevented through their helpline.

More men have been saved every week since Project 84, than ever before: suicides prevented reached a 3-year high, with more suicides prevented per week in the 40 weeks following Project 84, than 40 weeks prior to the campaign.

Thanks to Project 84 there are at least 239 men alive today, who wouldn’t have been

Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. Despite this, it remains a stigmatised, silent killer which is under-acknowledged by culture at large with people being unable to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. This was unacceptable. We wanted to create something that would stop the public and government in their tracks and make them pay attention, with media channels that would make the topic as real, human and visible as possible.