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Ask any suicide survivor what thoughts were running through their mind when they decided to end their life, and you’ll come across a common theme: feeling trapped.
Trapped in relationships, trapped in financial circumstances, trapped by family, trapped by obligations that seem as impermeable as iron shackles.
In Western countries, men are a very high risk group for suicide. According to US numbers, men are four times more likely to complete suicide than women.
Having contemplated suicide, I can tell you that the notion of escape was powerful. As a psychiatrist colleague of mine, Dr David Codyre, put it so well: suicide is “an act that is driven by the absence of any other choice more than an act of choice”. It doesn’t set you free in a world where you feel trapped, but your overloading brain tells you that it’s the next best thing.
How did we get here? When I think of my grandfather and many like him who fought for our freedoms during World War II, I can’t help but wonder what it is about modern manhood that sees some of us take the exit route rather than hold onto the life that sheer luck has bestowed upon us. Could it be, despite thousands of years of male-dominated culture, that much of our freedom is illusory? Where is our missing freedom?
Here’s four things I think we need to work on:
1. Freedom to communicate
We avoid confrontation, unless it’s driven by physical aggression or the passive aggression of competition. We often fail to articulate what really drives us, upsets us, gets us out of bed in the morning or sends us into the pit of despair.
It’s not because we’re not capable of doing these things. The stereotype that men “don’t do feelings” and can’t communicate is a patronizing one. We don’t do it because we don’t think we’re supposed to do it. We fear that an honest conversation with a friend, partner, brother, sister, or parent will make them think less of us.
2. Freedom to love
Our avenues for showing affection toward one another are so limited. For heterosexual males, to show brotherly love and share physical, non-sexual touch carries with it a steamroller of judgment. At best, a hug might extend to a brief chest contact followed by three slaps on the back.
Surprisingly, gay men have more in common with their straight brothers than might seem obvious in this area. I shied away from showing physical affection for years because I was terrified someone might get the “wrong idea”. It didn’t matter how much I might have needed it. In fact, rejecting such affection was designed precisely to show how much I didn’t need it.
Because that’s what I believed it meant to be a man.
3. Freedom to be different
The Madonna song “What It Feels Like For A Girl” samples the following line from the 1993 film “The Cement Garden”: “Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it’s OK to be a boy.”
But it’s only “OK to be a boy” in a very restricted number of ways. The quote goes on to say that for a boy to look like a girl is considered “degrading”, and that this is rooted in misogyny.
I don’t believe we’re all misogynists, even those of us men who recoil at the idea of walking down the street dressed as a woman (though why anyone of any gender would wear high heels is a mystery to me). We’re crippled by fear, and it’s not just of looking like a girl. It’s of being or doing anything that’s considered by our peers or society to be girlish. Male nurses, hairdressers, personal assistants, retail workers … add your own stereotypical “pussy” professions to the list.
Again, straight and gay men alike do this to each other, out of competition to see who can be the most masculine. For both straight and gay men, a lack of masculinity equates to weakness and undesirability. Our sometimes unorthodox choices in music, clothing, leisure pursuits or careers can be cut off at a young age while we follow the path we believe we’re expected to, leading to deep dissastisfaction later in life.
4. Freedom to fail
I think all of us have a story somewhere in our past about our father, or a significant male figure in our lives, getting lost in the middle of nowhere on a trip and refusing to ask for help because he “knew” where he was going.
It’s just as well the earth is round, because if it weren’t, many of us—myself included—would swear blind that nothing was wrong in our calculations even as we continued to be sucked off the edge of the planet.
If there’s anything guaranteed to torture a man, it’s failure and the fear of it. Men are not supposed to get things wrong. Even in the book of Genesis, it was Eve who ate the apple and screwed everything up, that had nothing to do with us.
My one wish for men in the 21st century is that we gain the true freedom to fail and to respect that we’re all capable of it. Not only will it make us more courageous, more communicative, and more loving of our brothers, but it also will lead us to a realization that there’s many paths, many options available in life to make us happy men.
Hi Chris,
I found yor blog by accident. This was one of the first posts I read. It’s so true!
I love your blog it’s often very helpfull.
Thanx
Marcel 50 – 3x I tried to kill my self – since 2 month on Lamictal – all those years I thought I was just a “normal” (what is…) guy…. I’m busy to put my story in an Bipolar blog; writing helps me a lot.
My English is sometimes a bit Dutchie…
Thanks Marcel. Glad you’re still with us and well!
I’ll have to cut and paste from word-pad in future and do editing in a much larger font, I seem to miss quite a few errors with my visual problems when I go back to edit before posting. (On Facebook I can copy and delete after posting, then redo it.)
I’m sure there are quite a few reasons why some males (I say ‘males’ instead of ‘men’ a lot of the time because of the ideas or ideals attached to being a ‘man’) would feel that suicide is the only way out and much would have to do with societal pressures put on a man which varies from household to household and from each culture as well as our present day ‘workplace’ or ‘peer’ culture/pressure. Since many people with Asperger’s (it’s actually more frequent than one thinks) feel that they are aliens (outsiders) in their society anyway, they aren’t competitive or worried about being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and I feel there may be less inclination to appease societies expectations or even connected to others’ expectations. I’d like to know the statistics on this though. One reason is people on the Autistic spectrum are in a way isolated from society and live mostly in their own world, and can’t cope or deal with society in the first place. So for myself and others, we go for ‘hobbies’, obsessions or other things rather than try to ‘fit in’. In my case dreaming is the ‘escape’; not intentionally, but it’s easier for us to remove ourselves from a ‘depressing’ world and withdraw from it, after all we’re OK- it’s the world that isn’t, and sleep, fantasy or dreaming is the way out. This can ‘fulfilled’ by ‘mindless’ or impractical obsessions, unless your ‘speciality’ gets you to win in a contest, like my partner, who knows all the births, deaths and marriage dates of European aristocracy, or can lead into larger areas; say in the sciences, and one may end up as Einstein. (He is thought to have had Asperger inclinations- just look at the picture of him sticking his tongue out at convention!)
Yes being a human male is not so liberating as it is touted seem. I do see some (hetro?) men who go fishing, have a few beers and pour out there feelings for each other and engage in a hug. I, myself, have had a crying, hugging session with a fellow whose appearance was more like Charles Manson who would bash me instead. (But he was of Mediterranean extraction and I have ‘flirted’ with men of other cultures without them thinking of me as gay.) The fear of gay men is only real, I think, if there is doubt about one’s own sexuality, and the fear of ‘submitting’ to another male.
I’m astounded today, after the ‘hippy’ movement, there is still pressure on men to be ‘real men’, and it isn’t necessarily all from other men. One of my nephews thinks he has to ‘prove himself’ to his family, like the guys who fight each other for the ‘chicky babe’. He has delusions of being the top heavyweight boxer, but, at other times he admits that man can be attractive (as well as women) and has lot’s of body-building mags. (He’s diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic and I just got him out of hospital after his last psychotic event.)
Men get chastised from both angles, for not being able to communicate well and showing their feelings to being told they are misogynists when they have anger in their voices while a woman is present. I witness a case when a couple of guys were venting/expressing anger (not to any person), but was ‘reported’ by the group facilitator for being aggressive toward her and therefor they were misogynists. It’s one thing I know, that expressing one’s anguish or despair may look like aggression to others, whereas women are more able to both express anger and cry at the same time. All the emotions from being tearful to ‘angst’ and anger seem to be more acceptable for men as well as women to express in a ‘hot’ ‘Latin’ country (and in much of the world generally) than for it is for Anglo Saxons and other northern Europeans. In Japan, it’s often the push to achieve that causes problems, and I think, just as poofter-bashers often have a fear of homosexuality in themselves, depression can in some cases actually lead to externalising it with aggression towards others which may be the case in some spouse-bashing.
One big reason for suicide is pain, I think. I’ve found I can deal with things using my panadeine forte instead of the nauseous, spacey effects of the antidepressants I’ve tried. It’s not touted for the purpose of aiding depression, but in my case, the anxiety/depression etc. I have go with the physical pain I have on a really small dose. Again, I’m not neurotypical, so this just seems to work for me and I don’t get codeine dependency which is what the medicos get concerned about. The other medication I’m prescribed is dex-amphetamine, which I’ve had nearly every day for 5/6 years and never became addicted to that either. However, the side-effects can be awful, including anxiety, sweatiness and so on and require the codeine to counterbalance this. I’ve had to explain to my psychiatrist that the two do not simply ‘cancel’ each other. I need to be awake, out of pain and relaxed at the same time to be functional, productive and creative.
Thank you for this truly helpful post. It’s like you’ve captured everything that is going through my life right now. Although I have never contemplated suicide, I have been feeling trapped and overwhelmed. Taking each step, day by day to achieve all of the points made above. Thanks Again.
Another great post, Chris – which speaks to many things that happened in my formative years. 1. My Dad was so stereotypically male (as you described it), couldn’t ask for directions, couldn’t be wrong and in 60+ years of marriage, Mum says he NEVER once said the word sorry. However, what this did for me was make me adamant NOT to be a man (father, lover, etc) like my Dad. Ka-ching! Good decision, James 2. As a gay man, who grew up believing that I could love women (and conditioned to think that I NEEDED to get married, etc because it was illegal to be gay until I was well in my 20′s) I found one simple truth. I like my women feminine and my men masculine. It’s not that I don’t LIKE and enjoy spending time in the company of men of all shades, I’m just not typically physically attracted to a man who (for want of a better descriptive word) is camp. 3. As a nurse (of the male species) I was drawn towards mental health and back in the 80′s when I was training there were more straight (and therefore (???) less effeminate) men in this profession – the gay males being drawn towards the general side of nursing. I think this has changed, and in no small part because the very nature of working in mental health insists on (in the ideal world) as non-judgemental an attitude as possible. That’s not to say there are no, what I call, ‘pretend liberals’ in mental health, cos there sure as hell are! But (and here’s No 4.) I have seen how in mental health circles, we value the freedom to communicate that you speak of as so important, treasured, empowered and endorsed. Reading and re-reading this post, I can’t help but ponder on just how lucky a man I have been… I can’t imagine EVER contemplating suicide, but maybe that’s just because of my journey, I’ve never been in a position of feeling like I have no other choice? And who’s to say it will always be like this? But I truly hope so. Thanks for provoking my contemplative nature so sharply again, Chris!
And thanks for your thoughtful reply