Unified Community Solutions (my private consultancy) and the Carson J Spencer Foundation (Sally Spencer-Thomas's nonprofit organization) distributed the survey to help us explore developing more-effective programs and resources for suicide bereaved men. We are hopeful that by this summer, we'll have an idea about how we might begin making new inroads into supporting men bereaved by suicide.

His 14-year-old son, Jeremiah, died by suicide in 2008, and in Jeff's soft, clear voice, he tells us "the grief never goes away ... the guilt, you'll always have." I certainly get that. But even so, I hear in his words evidence of a man who is fighting the good fight, who -- in the very act of saying what he is saying -- is coping with his grief and dealing with his feelings.

"I was Jeremiah's parent," he says. "I was supposed to be his protector, so I'm the one that's responsible for that action." His declaration conjures up -- in the real voice of a real parent -- the tension between what caused his child's death and the responsibility he feels for his child's welfare. In those few words, he touches the heart of countless bereaved parents who struggle with what they did or didn't do. For me, the statement is not about fault or blame -- but about identity: I am the boy's father.

You know, people say, "Well time heals everything." Not when it comes to this.

What do we know about the needs of men who are bereaved by suicide, and -- if, in fact, male survivors of suicide loss do have unique needs -- what is being done to meet those needs? The answer to the first question is that we know very little specifically about men's needs after they experience a loss to suicide (beyond what we know generally about grief after suicide, about the differences between men's and women's psychological make-up, and about their different styles of communication and help-seeking). The answer to the second question is that almost nothing is being done to meet the special needs of men who have lost a loved one to suicide.

Here is a personal story -- not about grief specifically but about "sharing emotions" -- that illustrates why it is important to find answers to these questions.

The first experience I had that marked me as a man in therapy (as opposed to a woman in therapy) was in early 1982 in an aftercare support group in Twin Falls, Idaho, which was designed to help people who had completed inpatient treatment for addiction make a successful transition back to the community after spending a month in an institution.