I Don’t Want to Talk About It: The Secret History of Male Depression is a book that every man I know should read. Unfortunately not everyone wants to read a non-fiction book about male depression, and I don’t blame them. The book flips between patient stories and research findings, and both can be hard to summarize. What I’ve included below are some of my favorite findings and statements, things that I will continue to think about as I expand my study of male depression.
Anyone who needs help can reach out to me at [email protected] or visit SAMSA’s website for mental health resources.
The Problem
There is a terrible collusion in our society, a cultural cover-up about depression in men.
So begins Terrance Real’s book on male depression. The idea is simple: men are conditioned to suppress their feelings, fear vulnerability, and be ashamed of every weakness. As a result, many suffer from hidden depression, that manifests itself as other ailments:
I believe it is this secret pain that lies at the heart of many of the difficulties in men’s lives. Hidden depression drives several of the problems we think of as typically male: physical illness, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, failures in intimacy, self-sabotage in careers.
I have always had this nagging sensation that men in my life were suffering from this kind of covert depression. Where things appeared fine on a surface level, but lurking nearby was more deep-rooted unhappiness. This book helped articulate that for me, and this passage sums it up the subtle nature of covert depression best:
What David might have told you was that he was unhappy at work, where he had a new senior partner to deal with, whom he neither liked as well as his old mentor nor felt particularly favored by. He might have told you that over the last several years he had grown increasingly restless—to the point where it had become difficult for him to sleep at night without pills and hard to get through a dinner at a friend’s house without a few cocktails. David knew—though he would not have bored anyone other than Elaine with the details—that he was bothered more and more by stomachaches and by backaches, which his internist chalked up to “stress,” a medical opinion that David dismissed as “the great twentieth-century catchall.”
Men don’t say to other men – “hey, what’s been going on with you recently? You don’t seem like yourself” – because doing so makes them vulnerable. And we hate that. But the David from the book is many of us, at different times in our lives. Those nagging problems can be indicative of larger distress.
Society and Masculinity
Men are four times more likely than women to take their own lives.
A huge part – and what I’m choosing to focus on here – of the book is centered around masculinity’s role in male depression. Men and women are not treated equally, and men are taught from an early age to suppress emotion. We practically define masculinity as a fear of vulnerability:
Boys and men, on the other hand, when asked to describe masculinity, predominantly responded with double negatives. Boys and men did not talk about being strong so much as about not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They did not speak about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers. In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys’ acquisition of gender is a negative achievement.
I know this all too well from experience: My guy friends and I do not sit down and talk about our emotions. When someone goes through a breakup we commiserate – “that sucks man.” We don’t ask how our friend is feeling, or if he wants to talk through anything.
In addition to boys themselves, parents often treat their sons and daughters differently, leading to feelings of unworthiness and distorted notions of healthy relationships:
Ryan’s parents rarely demonstrated physical affection for one another and, while they had shown physical nurture to him as a young boy and still did to his sister, they stopped displaying such affection for him at the age of six or seven.
Categorizing such neglect as trauma does not trivialize the nature of trauma. I think not touching a child for decades at a time is a form of injury. I think withholding any expression of love until a young boy is a grown man is a form of emotional violence. And I believe that the violence men level against themselves and others is bred from just such circumstances.
Masculine norms also lead to damaged relationships:
A great many men have been falsely empowered by this culture’s belief that discipline is not required in their domestic lives—relationships need not be actively worked on.
Substance Abuse and Addiction
Male substance abuse is a significant result and cause of depression in men. As Terrance highlights:
Nondepressed men turn to mood-altering behaviors like drinking, gambling, or sex for relaxation, intimate sharing, or fun. Covertly depressed men turn to such substances or activities to gain relief from distress.
But we aren’t just addicted to substances:
Most of us are thrilled if we win an award, find out about a financial windfall, or arouse interest in someone attractive. But in normal circumstances we do not rely on such things in order to feel good about ourselves. The covertly depressed man, in contrast, relies on such external stimulants to rectify an inner baseline of shame.
This leads to a race to the bottom, regardless of the addictive behavior, that ends up taking a toll on our wellbeing:
It is hard for many successful men, like Thomas, to see the harmful effects of compulsive work until the relational bill comes due.
Last Word
I will finish with Terrance’s most powerful statement:
Those who fear subjugation have limited repertoires of service. But service is the appropriate central organizing force of mature manhood. When the critical questions concern what one is going to get, a man is living in a boy’s world. Beyond a certain point in a man’s life, if he is to remain truly vital, he needs to be actively engaged in devotion to something other than his own success and happiness. The word discipline derives from the same root as the word disciple. Discipline means “to place oneself in the service of.” Discipline is a form of devotion. A grown man with nothing to devote himself to is a man who is sick at heart.
Too often, we’re taught as men that a good life is one we achieve as an individual. Becoming a millionaire, a sports star, a badass. But the main theme echoing throughout I Don’t Want to Talk About It is that those lives do not bring fulfillment – they bring about depression.