Andrew Lawes seeks to erase the stigma that prevents men from getting the help they need before they see killing themselves as the only option.
Suicide. Seven letters, three syllables. An act that affects so many people. An event which leaves so many questions, never to be answered. A word that so few are able to say. Emotions that so few are willing to discuss openly.
Yesterday, I read this speech by Kevin Betts, an open letter to his father, who committed suicide. A young man who lost his father to something that seems so preventable. In it, he talks of how people reacted to his father taking his own life, and how, to many people, “suicide appeared to be a dirty way to die.”
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Today, I researched some statistics. Typically, men are 3-4 times more likely to commit suicide than women. Only one country in the entire world, China, has a suicide rate for females that is higher than for males. In America, males aged between 20 and 24 are seven times more likely to commit suicide than females of the same age. But there was one statistic in particular that jumped out at me.
Less than 20% of young men who commit suicide had any contact with either their GP or mental health services in the year before they took their own life.
To put that statistic another way, out of every 5 young men that commits suicide, 4 of them feel unable to ask for professional help. There could be various reasons for this. Men are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol when in a bout of depression, which can both mask and exacerbate their feelings. When depressed, men are more likely to display feelings of anger, frustration and irritation than feelings of sadness, which may leave them unable to realise that they are, in fact, depressed. But for me, there is one reason, above all others, that is at fault for this, and that is the image of the “Alpha Male”.
Throughout history, men have been taught that to be the ‘strong, silent’ type is a virtue. They have been told that “boys don’t cry”. They don’t talk about ‘feelings’, because that is something “only girls do”, and to do so lowers your status as a man. These are lessons that have been bred for generations, traits that are taught from childhood.
It’s time for men to realise that this is bullshit. There is nothing brave about bottling up your emotions to the point where you feel suicide is the only option. There is nothing manly about shutting people who love you out from the truth of what you are going through.
I read the excellent book “A Life Too Short” by Ronald Reng, which is about the German footballer Robert Enke’s struggles with depression, which ultimately ended with him committing suicide. The saddest part of the book, for me, is that the “Alpha Male” culture in football left him feeling unable to seek the help he needed. He was scared of the reaction if he revealed he suffered with mental health problems. The stigma was too great for him to be honest about the help he needed.
Would things have been different if Enke had been open about what he was going through? It’s a question that can never be answered. But if it hadn’t have been for the stereotypical view of what a man should be, maybe he could have received more help and support, and maybe his wife wouldn’t be a widow.
Nowadays, there is so much support available for people with suicidal thoughts. Confidentiality laws mean that you can seek help without fear of it becoming public knowledge. The internet enables you to talk to people completely anonymously, to seek support without anybody ever knowing who you are. There is no excuse for anybody to take their own life without seeking help first. But you have to seek the help. You have to be open. There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
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My name is Andrew Lawes. I am 27 years old. I have suffered from depression since, at least, my early teens. I have self-harmed. I have felt like I’m going insane. And yes, at times, I have wanted to end my own life. I have had suicidal wishes. At times, it felt like the only escape from the insanity that seemed to have become my mind. I have told my story, and I sought help. I am not ashamed to say that I still struggle now. Each day brings its own challenges. I get through, because I have the help and support of doctors, friends and family. I am still alive, but without that help, I may well be dead.
It isn’t easy to be open about how you feel. But to those men who think bottling it all up is brave, you need to realise that being open about your feelings is a thousand times braver. However bad life seems, right now, you are still alive. There is still the chance it can get better. Whatever has happened in your life, be proud of the fact you are still here fighting, when so many have given up. Be proud that you have made it this far. If you are feeling suicidal, don’t lock it away inside yourself. Talk to your friends, to your partner, to your doctor. Any fight is easier when you fight it with others by your side.
You don’t have to go through this by yourself. However isolated you feel, however much you are convinced nobody will understand, let me tell you now, you are not alone. You are never alone. Even if you are scared, be honest about your feelings. Seek help, because the alternative isn’t worth thinking about.
As for the “Alpha Male” culture, it’s time it was cast aside like the relic it is. The bravest thing I have ever done was admitting how scared I was of the thoughts that went through my head. The manliest thing that I have ever done is ask for help, because I can’t handle the world without it.
Be a man. Get help.
To quote Buffy Summers: “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live.”
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photo of death and dolor — coffin bearer carrying casket at funeral to cemetery by Shutterstock.com
About Andrew Lawes
I have been bullied (mobbed) in my current workplace on an Australian University campus, since October 2010. Layered on top of the complex trauma with which I live but are usually able to manage, that bullying has had an horrific impact on my mental and physical health. I am now at the point where all my usual coping mechanisms and support strategies have failed. In desperation, I researched and made contact with a psychiatrist, who I thought would have been competent enough to respond appropriately to my presenting symptoms. However, his initial gruff response was basically, ‘what are you doing here?’ and his contempt only worsened across our 50 minute session. While asking, had I ever been suicidal, which I had, he failed to ask the essential question, are you suicidal now, which I am. One of the great paradoxes in suicide prevention in Australia is that men are encouraged to step forward and talk about their emotional problems but when they do, they are likely to encounter the type of hostile, counter-therapeutic response to which I just referred. This is a brutal country, with an extraordinarily high level of acceptability for violence.
As an Australian male I have learnt the hard way how risky it is to reveal your emotions and as a consequence have developed an extremely thick skin. The basic response is generally “harden the fuck up” so I did, what else can you do? I’m resigned to it. My best mate was killed in a car accident and one of his blokey friends made a point of telling me that he could see my emotions showing through at the funeral. It was like he was telling me I’d slipped up, like he had one over me , like a kind of one up manship in a slightly condescending tone. Another one of his mates commented indirectly in a detached manner “death’s a part of life, get over it”. It was in another context but I know he was having a go at me for crying. This was the day after it happened.
Wow you gotta get yourself some better friends, mate.
yea anybody who is going to use you ability to have and express emotions in order to make themselves feel better should go hang out with the other 5 year olds. Let them. They are not people of Character. A true friend is family. They are meant as support in a world where everyone else is trying to compete and feel good about themsleves no matter the cost. find some better mates indead.
No, HIS FRIENDS SHOULD CHANGE.
Thank you for highlighting my letter to my dad. I really hope it helps to turn asking for help into a typically male thing to do!
I too have read the Robert Enke book and have been blown away recently by the openness of some blokes in the public eye. We can see the tides turning slowly but surely in this country, and I hope that the snowball continues to roll. When young people see us talk, they’ll always expect to do the same.
Thank you for your openness nad honesty. It can do nothing but good!
Let’s face it, it takes huge courage as a man to admit any form of vulnerability. But it is clear, the moment you allow yourself to express and articulate your emotions, anxieties and fears you allow others to do the same.
We are all waiting in the wings, hoping someone might just take the first step that allows us to share our own feelings.
When a person stumbles and falls in the street most people will walk by or wait for someone else to come forward and help, only then are capable of joining in. We are scared, scared to make a fool of ourselves, scared to help because it exposes us to the frailty of others. Imagine if we all had the courage to stop and lend a hand. Think how much less vulnerable we would feel each time we take a step out into the world.
Andrew, you hold a mirror up, whether we like the reflection or not. Thanks for helping us drop drop our defenses.
You don’t even need to be the one talking and sharing your vulnerablilities to make change. if you don’t feel that you are in a position yet to be able to share, it may be an easier step to be the reciever. If there is a man in your life that does come to you to share his vulnerabilities (or some guy you just met on the bus) you can encorage it by being supportive and listening instead of criticizing him and telling him to man up or deal with it.
you don’t always have to be the one sharing to make a difference. how you respond makes just as big of a difference.
I spent my senior years of highschool and first few years of adulthood wishing I was dead, self-harming, etc. I live in Australia and bullying was rife at highschool, the attitude was “eat cement n harden up”. I haven’t worked much for a decade since highschool due to illness, mainly my extreme social anxiety disorder and many people treat me like I am a waste of space, they don’t believe my illness is legitimate or real, I am to just eat cement n harden up apparently..Luckily I found good therapists and also friends n family that give a damn but I was very close to not existing anymore a few years ago…
Archy, I think many of us have come up against the TTFU attitude. I have always wondered what people wearing “No Fear” t-shirts were trying to hide.
On a personal note, I have to mention Unstuck by James Gordon. It is a remarkable book that approaches depression and anxiety not as a disease but as a wake up call that our lives are out of balance. It follows Joseph Campbells arc of the Heroes Journey, a worthy blueprint.
It takes a lot of time and energy to be supportive especially with this sort of thing. What I learned coming out of depression is there is NO WAY, not enough words in the dictionary, to describe the kind of thing that one endures with depression. The one Line that has always stuck with me through the years regarding depression is Staind’s “such a cancer on the face of everything that’s beautiful, I wish this would just go.”
I think a lot of people’s reactions are out of fear that they don’t know the first thing to do to help so they put the responsibility back on you.
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”
—Washington Irving
I cry a lot for a guy. It’s very easy for me to get swept up in emotional contagion (I phrase it as thus: I “receive” and “amplify.”) I was a pall-bearer alongside the other grandsons a few years ago at my grandfather’s funeral, and when the funeral director pulled the pall over his face and closed the coffin, I was the only one amongst us who cried. I felt like I’d broken some horrible taboo for doing so, like I’d ruined Grandpa’s last big send-off by breaking with character. It took me years (and an awful lot of ruminating upon the above quote from Mr. Irving) to understand that I was probably the strongest man in the room at the time; that my grandfather deserved to be mourned; that my tears were the implicit and necessary price of loving my grandfather.
Men are just as vulnerable as women: We’re sometimes simply expected to put on a strong front for the benefit of others out of societal pressures and expectations. But there is no shame in grief, and we need to teach this to our sons just as we teach it to our daughters.
“When depressed, men are more likely to display feelings of anger, irritation, and frustration than feelings of sadness…”
A friend of my husband’s used to get drunk after work and sometimes stayed up all night and try to pick fights with random strangers….his wife used to get calls in the middle of the night from his co-workers begging her to come and pick him up and get him home….
This couple lived in our house for a couple of months but this story really shocked me…that he had such a need to fight (even though he was very successful and prominent in his profession)…My husband and I knew him for many, many years, but after the divorce from his first wife we started to see a much uglier side of his personality….it was really frightening for me to know this and to have him living under the same roof….
He is originally from England….from the stories he told about growing up in Manchester and Birmingham, he made it sound like this was not an uncommon type of behavior found in his working class neighborhood…even more frightening was watching him try to involve my husband in his drinking and fighting bouts (as if he was grooming him to be his protege)….needless to say, we are no longer friends with him….[and my marriage has barely survived this, too]…
There is no such abstract, suspended-in-the-air thing as “stigma”, but actual actions by actual people. It is not something that exists merely in the heads of the men in crisis, but *actual* costs of showing vulnerability while male. Whenever a man in crisis is told to “man up”, there is *a somebody* who has made *a conscious choice* to tell him that, and so it is whenever a man in crisis observes that friends stop calling him after he’d shown vulnerability. These somebodies and these choices should be *stigmatized*.
> It’s time for men to realise that ["boys don't cry"] is bullshit.
It’s time for those who want to help prevent male suicides to realize that this bullshit is *actually enforced*, and go after the enforcers. It is also time to stop demanding that men in crisis undertake additional effort to restructure their gender identity so that it actually becomes less viable in the current gender-enforcing cultural reality, but more like what feminists want men to be.
> You have to be open. There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
Preach that to the shamers, not to the shamed.
This article completely misses the point. “Boys don’t cry” is bullishit true, but this bullshit is *actually enforced*. Stop demanding from suicidal men that they undertake additional effort to rework their gender identity. Go after the enforcers and tell *them* to change.
I agree with BASTA!. You can complain all you want that “boys don’t cry … is bullshit”. But that doesn’t change the fact that showing vulnerability has very real costs in terms of lack of respect, belittling, and other negative reactions from people.
I know that making yourself vulnerable can lead to those things you both describe. But it shouldn’t, and that’s my point, that’s what I tried to convey. I know how hard it is to open up and make yourself vulnerable,which is why I write, because I’m lucky to have a support network that helps me immensely. Others feel they can’t open up, and that’s so damn wrong. But until people consistently challenge the attitudes of people who mock and belittle us, nothing will change. With my writing, I hope to challenge those attitudes, and maybe help others realise they aren’t alone, and they can open up knowing there are people to support them. It may take time, and it won’t be easy, but one day, the attitudes of those who mock us will be seen as being as offensive and ignorant as racists are seen nowadays.
But it does and it’s not the fault of the men. Society doesn’t like men who make themselves a burden onto others by being in any sort of need, whether it’s suicide or homeless or a disabled war vet. He is often suicidal because his friends and family find him to be a useless burden and don’t want to be around him. Showing weakness only exacerbates the underlying problem that’s causing him to be suicidal in the first place. People, especially women and loved ones, will often react to a suicidal man with anger and accuse him of being selfish, childish, and manipulative. They simply want him to perform, to make their lives better, not to be a burden on them. Men have no intrinsic value in our society, the way women do, just for being there in our lives.
Professional help is no better, as mental health professionals are hopelessly inept in treating men as something other than faulted women who need to adjust their own behavior. It’s often enough to convince a woman that things aren’t nearly so bad as she has come to believe, but with suicidal men it is more often exactly as bad as they’ve come to believe. Women have far more suicidal tendencies without actually committing suicide – that’s why professionals can treat them so easily.
> Professional help is no better, as mental health professionals
> are hopelessly inept in treating men as something other than
> faulted women who need to adjust their own behavior.
I may be naively optimistic but I don’t think this kind of “hard misandry” is at play here. More likely it’s just that since psychotherapy was originally created for female patients, the methods it has since developed rely on feminine emotional communicativeness in the patient. Turning men into emotional women is therefore a preparatory procedure (I call it “perineal trepanation”), rather than the ultimate goal.
Lots of interesting responses here and none that surprise me. But to one or two of them cut to the heart of the problem. Vulnerability is at the core of human existence, and perhaps to deny it is the deepest vulnerability of all. No person, man or woman, is comfortable with the feelings and emotions it brings up. And this is what makes it all the harder to share, whether you are the bearer of the recipient. But we must. If we don’t, it doesn’t go away, it simply festers, gains strength and power and comes back with a vengeance.
We cannot overcome our fears (or others), rational or otherwise, unless we confront them. That takes the greatest courage of all. You can spend your life in fear of snakes or you can learn to handle one.
How we respond is absolutely critical. To dismiss anothers pain diminishes them and denies our own humanity.
I won’t say that I’ve ever seen it as the only option but with all the health and financial problems I’ve gone through the last few years I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes see it as one option.
Thanks for writing this.
Some stuff is way beyond the reach of reason or even general understanding. Some troubles are so ugly that there is no help and there will never be any help in this lifetime.
No one really gives a flip about the guys that take the plunge. Its why we take the plunge.
Making one’s self vulnerable can also lead to an acceleration of same. Efforts to seek true remedy sought through people is about .05% successful…maybe.
People who advocate “being open about what you feel” as the cure to the suicide plague seem to have a quasi-religious belief in the universal effectiveness of this approach.
It cannot be emphasized enough that this belief is false. A therapeutic strategy or an intervention strategy that works for some, even for the majority, can be OUTRIGHT LETHAL for others for profound personality-bound reasons: it may actually push them over the edge!
I implore all crisis intervention professionals to paint this in big bold red letters across the ceilings of their bedrooms, so it’s the first thing they read when they wake up: STATISTICALLY EFFECTIVE DOES NOT EQUAL UNIVERSALLY EFFECTIVE. There *are* people for whom being forced to open up is 0% benefit and 100% additional suffering.
Basta, I wasn’t suggesting that everybody be fully open with the world about their emotions. Like you say, that can have disastrous consequences. I was just meaning that they should open up and ask for help from someone, whether that be family, a loved one, a therapist or even just a doctor. If you feel suicidal, keeping your feelings to yourself is a dangerous strategy. They may not get everything right, but on the whole, doctors do try to help, if they know the extent of your situation. That’s where the openness comes in.
Well worth a few minutesof your time…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cNFU27oJQM