Everyman Online Men's Journal

Issue 69 -- Male Depression and Suicide

A Note from Jackie
Every year at this time, I am saddened as I remember a dear friend, husband and father of four who, so burdened by a separation and divorce from his wife, from his children and from his home, took his own life. I remember that he called me from his office in another city in the middle of a work day, time-out from his busy medical practice. We chatted -- "How are you? How's the family? When are you coming to see us? Gotta go. Take care." We hung up and I uneasily noted afterwards that a call at that time of day was unusual. But I soon returned to my own routine and did not think of it again. And so I live with the painful memory of a dear friend who is lost to the many people who loved him. For those who, as Woodrow Willow described in his article, In the Cant of the Enemy, ". . .reached out. . .(and) got a busy signal," the articles from Issue # 69 entitled Male Depression and Suicide are dedicated here. If you would like to add something of your thoughts and experiences, or questions or memorials here, I will post them for all to read or not as you wish. Send to Jackie at webmaster(at)everyman(dot)org.

Selected Article:
The Gender Journey -- Too Close to Home
by Michael Rudy
"I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night,” I said in hanging up the phone. My friend Laura was in the hospital with no one really able to say definitively why her arm suddenly ballooned. My good pal, Lance, had just been telling me about his experience. “My doctors didn’t know what they were doing! Tell her she has to get an infection specialist,” he said supportively. Those were the last words I can remember him saying to me.

Maybe he said, “Good night,” I can’t remember now. The whole conversation was one of those ‘throwaway’ chats, like a hundred others I have each week. I think my real last words to him were, “I’ll check in with you tomorrow,” with an absent -minded assurance as if the event was guaranteed. It wasn’t. Lance was only two hours away from uncapping two .22 caliber bullets into a heart that had been dying for all of his 36 years. How symbolically perfect! Shot in the heart!
(Read the entire artcle by clicking here for the full pdf)

Some Selected Quotes:
Psychological & Physical Health
Depression may be as strong a predictor of a looming heart attack as high blood pressure or a soaring cholesterol count.

The emotional havoc wrought by the death or disappearance of a parent, especially a mother, before or during puberty, is repeatedly cited in the literature on depression. Incomplete mourning for any great loss in life is one of the gunpowder trails that may blow up in later life into clinical depression. . . . Men are five times more likely than women to use alcohol and drugs to reduce the sad feelings of depression. (Women usually use food.) Men are also more likely to do violence and to have accidents (with cars or hunting), and much ore likely than women to end their own lives.

--from Understanding Men’s Passages: Discovering the New Map of Men’s Lives, by Gail Sheehy, Random House of Canada, Toronto, 1998, p. 230 & 235.

Quiet Desperation
Those in the healing professions know that wherever there is denial the wound festers. Or, as the twelve-step programs put it, what one resists, persists. Men’s lives are based on denial and resistance to the truth. Rarely does one hear the unvarnished truth, as in the confession of Pablo Neruda: “ It so happens I am sick of being a man.” Note that he does not say he is sick of being himself; it is his role as a man that sickens him.

This is the deepest truth men carry, that their souls are deformed through being defied by outside forces. For every Thoreau who slips away to the woods for a while to find his soul again, to engage in a radical revisioning of his life, there are a million men, and women too, who every day slide back into collective anonymity and soullessness.

--from Under Saturn’s Shadow. The Wounding and Healing of Men, by James Holliss, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1994, pp.119-120.