/r/unpopularopinion/comments/e2gfsv/men_dont_conceal_their_depression_because_they/ Thoughts?
Depression brain lies to people. Depression brain tells you that nobody cares about your problems and they don’t want to help and you’re just a burden if you say anything.
Turns out it does that regardless of gender.
I could probably point you to a dozen posts without even stretching that talk about people losing male friends to depression and being devastated because they didn’t even know their friend was hurting and would have done whatever they could to help.
The negativity in that reddit post is a lie.
There’s a post I saw on here today that was talking about male vulnerability that broke down to “you don’t want to be vulnerable in a real, ugly way, you just want men to share emotionally appropriate secrets” and that’s bullshit. It’s a lie. It’s a lie in two ways.
First off people as a whole aren’t really comfortable with *anybody* shedding messy feelings. Weeping at your desk at work makes people uncomfortable with you, period, end. People don’t find that attractive or compelling or nobly vulnerable, they just get screamingly uncomfortable and avoid you. Paula from Accounting and Matt from Engineering aren’t paid to deal with your shit and if they can’t handle it that’s not their fault. Sharing your feelings and being vulnerable isn’t the same as feelings-bombing your unsuspecting co-workers or the PTA.
And secondly just because someone is uncomfortable or unequipped doesn’t mean they don’t care. Paula from Accounting is probably really, really worried if she sees you crying at your desk but that doesn’t mean she has the kind of relationship with you where she can actually talk to you about it.
*Trigger warnings, self harm*
I used to cut myself. Big surprise, right? I mostly did it privately but one time I was so achingly fucked-up and in need of any kind of help that I used an eraser and scrubbed away at the skin of my hand until I was bleeding all over Mr. Constantine’s World History class.
And I sat there in history class, cutting myself, completely convinced that nobody saw me, that I was invisible, that if they did see me they didn’t care because nobody said anything.
Now, spoilers, fifteen-year-olds are selfish and emotionally immature. It was completely unfair of me to put that kind of burden on the kids around me and I do regret it.
But an interesting thing happened.
A few years after high school I was sitting in the parking lot of a local Albertson’s chainsmoking and reading at 3am because I am a healthy and normal person. And as I sat there I recognized some voices - it was three boys who had been in high school with me all grown up!
One of them, Michael, had always been kind of friendly with me in a standoffish “I’m an honors student and you’re an honors student but you’re really fucking weird so I’ll nod to you in the hallways and won’t shit-talk you if we have an assignment together but we’ll never eat lunch together or anything” kind of way. And Michael came over to talk to me!
It’s been kind of a theme with people from high school that when they talk to me they either end up saying “Oh, I thought you’d be dead by know” or “you married a guy? are you fucking with me?” at some point in our conversation so I was kind of expecting it. I wasn’t expecting Michael Salutatorian-I-Just-Finished-Med-School to give me a hug and start crying when he said he thought I’d be dead by now.
Because, see, Michael sat next to me in Mr. Constantine’s World History class. And he told me he’d seen me cutting myself in class and he’d been so worried about me that he made more of an effort to be nice to me at school but he had no idea what to do about it. He had no idea if he should tell someone or say something to me.
I still feel bad about putting that on Michael and the other kids in our class (though I was ten pounds of crazy in a five pound sack so I can at least recognize that I didn’t intend to hurt anyone and with updated information wouldn’t do the same thing) but in hindsight I’m really glad that things happened the way they happened because it actually really means a lot to me that people could see that I was hurting and just didn’t know how to help.
Now that I am a much more emotionally mature adult with seventeen years of therapy under my belt and I can recognize suicidal ideation as the lying depression brain bullshit that it is I’ve also gotten to be much, much better at asking appropriate people for help.
That reddit comment mentions that women have networks to support their depression and those don’t just come from nothing, they are built. You have to build them. And I’m lucky enough that I know plenty of guys who have built similar networks so I’m really happy to tell you that you can do it too, buddy. And even if you don’t have one ready-made I know there are whole internet communities dedicated to helping out people in tough situations. I know literally dozens of people personally who have been able to ask for help from friends they made on tumblr or twitter or through video games or fucking CalGuns.
Also the solution to feeling like you’re unsupported isn’t to say “well, I guess nobody cares, better just hold onto this feeling until it kills me” it’s to keep asking for support. And yeah, maybe that support *only* comes from a paid therapist at first but a really, really big component of a lot of therapy is working on interpersonal relationships so that you can have a healthy support network.
I do recognize that it is not, currently, easy for men to reach out for help with mental illness. I recognize that there are social barriers for men that frequently do not exist for women.
Looking at the way things are now versus the way things were ten years ago I really feel like that’s changing. I believe that our society now is more knowledgeable about mental illness and how destructive social isolation can be and how to help than we were ten years ago.
And if there is absolutely no one else you can ask for help at the very, very least you can get started with this gigantic list of crisis hotlines.
Yeah. The world sucks and it’s hard to get help. But the first step is to ask. I’m so, so, so pleased with the fact that we’re educating people about building healthy support networks and giving them the terminology to discuss their problems and opening up about the issues that we have so that other people know they aren’t alone in their feelings or pain, but if none of that is enough, if none of that helps you, you still have to ask for help. And you might not get it right away, but you aren’t going to get help at all if you don’t ask.
Also in case you didn’t know it Movember is funding mental health research and resources for men in addition to prostate cancer research; one of their supported group is Heads Up Guys, which has some helpful information for men dealing with depression and good resources for supporting you depressed friends.
