This morning I’m wrapping up a book called I Don’t Want to Talk About It: overcoming the secret legacy of male depression by Terrence Real. It’s been a fascinating read, and has challenged me to think deeply about men, depression, relationship roles and addictive behaviors. So, for a taste, here are a couple of quotations that made me put the book down and think…
While depression may carry some sense of stigma for all people, the disapprobation attached to this disease is particularly acute for men. The very definition of manhood lies in “standing up” to discomfort and pain…In the calculus of male pride, stoicism prevails. All too often, denial is equated with tenacity. (35)
There is nothing wrong with a nuanced assessment of one’s own or another’s talents, limitations, gifts, and difficulties. Such discrimination becomes unhealthy when it puts one’s own or another person’s essential worth on the line. Mature people do not question their intrinsic value at a working lunch or a PTA meeting. But most men do, whether they want to admit it or not. (182)
Just about anything can be used as an addictive defense – spending, food, work, achievement, exercise, computer games. When a man with covert depression uses something we normally think of as benign, or even as positive, like work or exercise, it seems almost laughable to insist on questioning the function of that activity in his life. But ordinary activities used as a defense against depression can have wide-ranging consequences. (270)
For generations, traditional men have been willing to slog their way through combat trenches, dirty, mean jobs, dangerous occupations, to sacrifice their health, even lie down and die, for the sake of their breadwinner roles. Men have enjoyed the “privilege,” as more and more angry voices are rising to say, of killing themselves. In return, what men have been promised is an appreciative, saintly wife – a whore in the bedroom, a kitten on the living room couch, a scintillating cocktail companion, and a damn fine cook and homemaker. This is not a mature relationship. It is what I have taken to speak of with couples as traditional emotional pornography. (306)
It’s a long read, but Real tells a lot of fascinating stories that keep a lay-person like myself reading!
Twitter Updates
Definitely sounds like he is spot on with his assessment of depression in men. I’m adding this to my ‘someday-after-I’m-not-in-school’ reading list.