Part 1
Depression and suicide have been my companions for as long as I can remember. I was five years old when my middle-aged father overdosed on sleeping pills. Although he didn’t die, our lives were never the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to prevent it from happening to other families.
In an article, “Being Bipolar: Living and Loving in a World of Fire and Ice,” I described my own mental health challenges and healing journey. In my book, The Irritable Man Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Root Causes of Depression and Aggression, I shared my research and clinical experience that convinced me that men and women differ in how they deal with depression and aggression in their lives and in other ways as well.
Depression and suicide are not just problems for men, but there is something about being a man that increases the risk of suicide. According to recent statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health, the suicide rate among men is, on average, 4 times higher (22.8 per 100,000) than among women (5.7 per 100,000) and at every age the rate is higher among men than women:
Even during our youth, when suicide rates are relatively low, men are still more likely to kill themselves than women. It is also clear to me, as my wife and I move into our 80s, we face many challenges as we age, but it is older men who end their lives more often by suicide at rates 8 to 17 times higher than for women .
In my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family, I describe my father’s slide into depression and the despair that grew when he couldn’t find work. As a writer, he regularly wrote entries in his diaries. I still feel the pain as I reread them and feel his growing shame when he couldn’t support his family:
July 3:
“Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college order with love of books, love of people, good, solid knowledge. I was not given any guidance. For two-thirds of my life I’ve been stuck, broken and blundered.”
July 24:
“Eddie, dear, Johnny, I love you so much, but how shall I get the bread to support you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It remains sterile for months and then gnaws away until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells inside me like a great goiter that blackens space for hopes, dreams, joy and life itself.”
August 8:
“On Sunday morning, my humanity is gone, my sense of comedy has collapsed. I’m tired, desperately tired, surrounded by a vast brick wall, a world of bricks with blood, spattered with my blood, with the blood of my head where I knocked senselessly to find an opening, to find a loose brick, so I could feel the cool breeze and I could reach out and pluck a handful of wheat, but this brick wall is impregnable, not an ounce of mortar loosens, not a brick gives.’
September 8:
“Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkle when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with titles a block, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, as long as you make nobody, black, to become pale and sick.”
October 24:
“Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I’m moving away looking for a job, anything to support my family. I try, I try, I try, I try, I try. I always try and I never stop.”
November 12:
“A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, have been completely exhausted. Middle-aged, I stand staring ahead, numb, confused and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, knocking on the same doors I knock on, striving in the same field I strive. Yes, on a Sunday morning in November, my hope and the flow of my life are both hopelessly low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, empty curtain is about to come down.”
Four days later, he overdosed on sleeping pills and spent seven years in a mental institution receiving “treatment” until the day he escaped. The book has a happy ending, but it took a long time to get there.
I’m sharing what I’ve learned over the years in an online course, “Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family.” I recently read a chapter in the book, The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health edited by JA Barry, et al., by Martin Seager, entitled From Stereotypes to Archetypes: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Help-Seeking and Suicide, which adds some important pieces to the puzzle and adds to my understanding of male depression and suicide and how we can help men and their families more effectively.
An Evolutionary Understanding of Male Psychology
“In our current age it is unfashionable to think that human gender is connected to our biology and evolution.”
says Dr. Seager.
“Gender is currently seen primarily as a social construct, a theory that underpins assumptions that gender can be fluid, shaped by education, or even chosen as part of a lifestyle. Gender is increasingly seen as a collection of disposable social stereotypes, separate and unrelated to biological sex.”
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“This hypothesis is bad science and even worse philosophy. . . . When set against the anthropological and cross-cultural evidence, a social constructionist theory of gender cannot explain clearly observable and universal patterns of male and female behavior.”
I agree with Dr. Seager and I have long argued that we cannot understand or help men or women without acknowledging our biological roots in the animal kingdom. In my book, 12 rules for good men, Rule #4 is “Embrace your billion-year male history.” I introduce the chapter with a quote from the cultural historian Thomas Berry.
“The natural world is the largest sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to be deprived of all that makes us human.”
I also say in the book that all humans are also mammals and we cannot understand humans without acknowledging this fact. Dr. Seager agrees.
“Human beings are evolved mammals and have never ceased to be so”
says Seager.
“Whatever social, cultural and political structures are placed upon us as humans, they cannot erase our mammalian heritage and are indeed structured and shaped by that heritage, although they are not determined or defined by it.”
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“Worldwide, in all human races or societies and throughout known history and prehistory, allowing for inevitable variation on a spectrum, there are universal patterns of male and female behavior in the human species.”
Based on the largest-ever study of human mating, which included more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures around the world, evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Buss found that there are two human natures, one male and one female. In his book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, Dr. David Buss explains the evolutionary roots of what men and women want and explains why their desires differ so radically.
“Among human beings perhaps the most obvious universal patterns of sexual differences are: Female: (1) Beauty, attractiveness and charm (Including adornment of the body) and (2) Stimulation and nurturing of newborn infants and young children. Male: (1) Physical protection (strength) and (2) Risk taking,”
says Dr. Seager.
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“In all human cultures throughout history and prehistory there is consistent and incontrovertible evidence that men assumed high levels of risk to protect and provide for their family, tribe and community or nation either collectively as groups of hunters and warriors or as individuals.
Some see men’s risk-taking as foolish, immature, self-destructive, and harmful to women and children as well as men themselves. But both Dr. Both Seager and I recognize that protection of women and children and risk-taking behavior are archetypal, instinctive, positive, and evolutionarily important survival strategies.
In part two of this series, we will continue our exploration of ways we can improve our understanding of male depression and suicide and how we can be more effective in helping men and their families.
You can learn more about Martin Seager’s work at Center for Men’s Psychology.
We need more programs for men that are evolutionarily-archetypally informed. You can learn more at MenAlive.com and MoonshotForMankind.org. If you like articles like this, I invite you to subscribe.
