suicide - MenAlive

From Here to Eternity: Stopping Male Stress and the Epidemic of Suicides

September 9, 2012 By JedDiamond 2 Comments

I have a personal, as well as professional, interest in male depression and suicide. It began with my father who was born in Jacksonville, Florida December 17, 1906. He was one of eight children whose parents had been born in Eastern Europe and had come to the United States in the late 1800s. From what I heard growing up, he was emotionally sensitive, artistic and talented. He wrote stories, poetry, and put on little plays for the family.

Unlike most of his brothers and sisters who either went into business or married business men, when he was 18 my father went to New York to become an actor. At first things looked bright. New York in the 1920s was full of glitter and glitz, a great place to be for a young man seeking fame and fortune. But that ended in 1929 with the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

It was in New York that he met my mother and they married on her birthday, October 5, 1934 after a somewhat stormy courtship. Economically things were difficult, but they were together and ready to weather the storm. When all money ran out they would invite friends and acquaintances to their small apartment and my father would put on a show—readings from Shakespeare, his own poetry, or short stories. The price of admission was a can of food.

But as the economic situation worsened so did his mood. He would snap at my mother. Small things irritated him. How she cooked, cleaned their apartment, or made the bed became points of discord. Recalling the times, my mother told me, “He was always on edge. I couldn’t seem to do anything right. No matter how much I tried to support him and let him know I cared, he still got mad at me.”

There were increasingly heated arguments and fights. He would accuse her of being interested in other men and “sleeping around.” She would proclaim her innocence and feel hurt. They would make up, make love, and everything would seem all right. And they would be all right, until the next time. There was always a next time.

My mother was always able to find work as a secretary. She had excellent skills and even in bad times people needed her talents and experience. However, there weren’t a lot of people looking for my father’s skills and talents. Not feeling comfortable at home, my father spent more and more time away. “He’s here, then he’s gone,” my mother would say. “Sometimes he wouldn’t come home until early the next morning.”

His brothers tried to convince them to come home to Florida and sell insurance like they were doing. My father laughed. “I’d rather die first.” It was a prophetic outburst. He nearly did die. Most of what I know about his life I learned from my mother and the journals that he kept in the last three years before he tried to kill himself.

Kay Redfield Jamison, an expert on mood disorders, uses an analogy from the animal kingdom to describe the difference ways men and women react to the stresses of life that can lead to depression and suicide. “Young male elephants go out and they are quite solitary,” she observed. “The only times males get together is during the breeding period in an adversarial role. They’re not talking about anything, they’re competing.

“Conversely, the female elephants are drawn together and are constantly communicating with each other. Female elephants have a system set up if one is in distress,” she continues, “and they are more likely to be there to serve and help one another. Like male elephants in an adversarial role, human men have an ‘irritability’ that is ‘part and parcel’ of depression,” she says. “It’s one of the diagnostic criteria for depression and mania, more common than not,” she explained. “Emotions get so ratcheted up, it’s often we see men with short-tempered fuses. It makes depression difficult for others to be around.”

This was certainly true of my father. He had a long history of irritability, anger, and depression, and male stress but it was the crashing economy that sent him over the edge. Here were the last journal entries before he tried to kill himself:

“June 4th:

Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.

“August 15th:

Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.

“November 8th:

A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze 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, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

Six days after his November 8th entry, my father tried to kill himself. Though he survived physically, emotionally he was never again the same. For nearly 40 years I’ve treated more and more men who are facing similar stresses to those my father experienced. The economic conditions and social dislocations that contributed to his feelings of shame and hopelessness continue to weigh heavily on men today.

Suicide is Predominantly a Male Response to Stress

Although suicide impacts women as well as men, it is predominantly a male response to overwhelming stress. In my book, Male vs. Female Depression: Why Men Act Out and Women Act In I reported on a major research study that concluded “Women seek help—men die.” The study found that 75% of those who sought professional help at a suicide prevention program were female. Conversely 75% of those who committed suicide in the same year were male.

These findings are corroborated by men’s health expert, Will Courtenay, Ph.D. in his book, Dying to be Men: Psychosocial, Environmental, and Biobehavioral Directions in Promoting the Health of Men and Boys (April, 2011, Routledge). Courtenay reports the following suicide and death rates (per 100,000 U.S. population) from the National Center for Disease Control, for males and females in various age groups:

We see that the suicide rate for young men is more than 4 times the rate for young women and the suicide rate for after retirement is 6 to 17 times the rate for women of the same age. Clearly men are at great risk and as populations age throughout the world, more men are likely to give up hope and kill themselves.

Age Group	Male Rate	Female Rate	Male/Female Ratio
15-19	10.9	2.7	4.0
20-24	21.4	4.0	5.4
25-29	19.5	4.7	4.2
30-34	18.3	5.2	3.5
35-44	23.9	6.8	3.5
45-54	25.8	8.8	2.9
55-64	21.4	7.0	3.8
65-74	21.5	3.4	6.3
75-84	27.3	3.9	7.0
85+	38.6	2.2	17.5

The Mancession

But many men are now losing their jobs before retirement. A recent editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry indicates that depression rates in men are likely to increase due to the socioeconomic changes going on in the world. The study’s principle author Boadie Dunlop, M.D., from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta writes, “Compared to women, many men attach a great importance to their roles as providers and protectors of their families. Failure to fulfill the role of breadwinner is associated with greater depression and marital conflict.”

Research shows that since the beginning of the recession in 2007, roughly 75 percent of the jobs lost in the United States were held by men. On the other hand, women are increasingly becoming the primary household earners with 22 percent of wives earning more than their husbands in 2007, versus only 4 percent in 1970. Unfortunately, there is little reason for anyone to believe that traditional male jobs will return in significant numbers even if the economy fully recovers. As depression increases, so too will suicide.

Getting Help and Support

The International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP) has designated September 10, 2012, World Suicide Prevention Day. On their site you can get good information on what people are doing all over the world to prevent suicide and you can learn what you can do to support their activities. In support of these activities I’m offering my new book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, which details my own experiences helping people deal with depression in their lives. For everyone who orders a book by September 10, 2012, I will donate 50% of the profits to IASP. For everyone who orders anytime during the month of September, I’ll donate 30% of the profits to IASP.

Working together we can make a difference. If you’d like to be part of our campaign to save the lives of a million men, and to learn how to stop male stress you can learn more HERE.

What has been your experience with male suicide? What resources do you have to share? Together we heal.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/helzerman/1234587061/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, male anger, male depression, male mortality, male stress, male suicide, men and stress, stop stress, suicide

Men and Stress – Is Your Job Driving You Over the Edge?

August 18, 2012 By JedDiamond 6 Comments

We know that depression is on the rise all over the world and men are 4 to 18 times (depending on age) more likely to commit suicide than are women. People report that job stresses are a major factor that can lead to depression and increased suicide risk. We know that men and stress can be a lethal mix. What are the professions that put you at highest risk? According to a recent report from Business Insider, based on statistics from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health the top ten jobs where you’re most likely to kill yourself are:

#10 Real Estate Sales

Real estate agents are 1.38 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#9 Potters and “hand-molders”

Hand molders are 1.39 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#8 Urban planners

Urban planners are 1.43 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#7 Supervisors of heavy construction equipment

Supervisors of heavy construction equipment are 1.46 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#6 Chiropractors

Chiropractors are 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#5 Finance workers

Finance workers are 1.51 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#4 Veterinarians

Veterinarians are 1.54 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#3 Dentists

Dentists are 1.67 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

#2 Physicians

Physicians are 1.87 times more likely to commit suicide average.

#1 Marine Engineers

Marine engineers are 1.89 times more likely to commit suicide than average.

Other high risk professions include: Pharmacists, Farm Managers, and Lawyers. What do all these “high suicide” professions have in common? I’d suggest that most of them involve people who must deal with other people’s problems in situations where they don’t get a lot of positive feedback and appreciation. When’s the last time you thanked your dentist or gave him a hug after he finished drilling and filling?

Of course, being employed can be stressful, but being unemployed can be even more stressful. According to an article in The Washington Independent, “The unemployed commit suicide at a rate two or three times the national average, researchers estimate. And in many cases, the longer the spell of unemployment, the higher the likelihood of suicide.”

So, if you’re employed, what are the things that are the most stressful and make you feel depressed? If you’re unemployed, what makes you feel the worst about yourself?

Maybe by sharing our experiences, we can help each other get through these difficult times.

For more information suicide prevention and men’s health, look for my new book MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.

Another post that you may find value in is 3 Little Known Stressors that are Killing Men and the Women Who Love Them.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/badjonni/403366211/lightbox/

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, male depression, male stress, male suicide, male unemployment, men and stress, suicide

Boomer Men, Stress, Depression, Anger and Suicide

August 7, 2012 By JedDiamond Leave a Comment

In a recent interview with Brent Green, author of Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future, he and I provide an in-depth, up-to-date look at the work I’ve been doing to help men, and the women to love them, to live well throughout our lives. Specifically we get into detail about baby boomer men and stress, male depression, male anger, and suicide.

You’ll learn about what motivated me to write my recent book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, and why I’ve committed myself to helping save the lives of a million males over the next three years. This is a unique opportunity to join me in exploring some of the most important issues we face in our lives today.

Click here to listen: Boomer Men and Stress

Enjoy the interview and thanks to WeEarth Global Radio Network.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulcross/5819125499/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, male depression, male menopause, male stress, male suicide, men and stress, suicide

MenAlive Partner / Affiliate Program

July 3, 2012 By JedDiamond Leave a Comment

My goal over the last 40 years has been to help men, and the women who love them, to live well throughout their lives. Most of us know that men die sooner and live sicker than women, but I was surprised by the research from the University of Michigan showing that “if we could reduce men’s death rate to the same level as women’s we would do more good than curing cancer.” Specifically it showed that we could save the lives of 330,000 men a year. That seemed to me a worthy goal, so I made a commitment to do everything I could to Keep a Million Men Alive (KAMMA) over the next three years.

If you resonate with this goal, I’d like you to join me in the MenAlive Partnership Program.

If life were like a baseball game, we’re losing men at three places along the base paths. Many of our young men don’t even make it to first base. Too many mid-life men fail to make the turn at second and end up alone in left field. Many older men don’t make it around third and end up dead in the dugout. Like a successful baseball game, my goal is to help men get around all three bases, make it home, and then help coach others.

My latest book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, has recently been published and brings together the work I have been doing for more than four decades. I strongly believe that the information it contains can help keep men alive and well and I want to get the book to a million men and their families. I also have put together my best e-books, white papers, and audio programs into a Diamond package to supplement the material in the book.

I can’t reach a million men by myself. Here’s where you come in. We all have our own social networks of friends, colleagues, and followers. If you would like to join me and become a KAMMA partner, I believe we can make a real difference in the world. I’m not doing this to get rich. I just want to help men and their families and make a living to keep my own family alive and well. I assume you would like that as well.

Read my post about Why I’d Rather Partner with You on my Book than with a Big Publisher.

You may know about “affiliate” programs, like Amazon where you encourage people in your network to buy a product and you receive a subsidiary payment. I’d rather have partners than affiliates, so my plan is to share revenues with you in a more equal way. I’ll keep 1/3 for me. 1/3 will go to my marketing partner Ian Fitzpatrick to organize and run the program. And 1/3 will go to you for all sales related to the project. Sign up and you’ll receive resources and tools to assist you in your effort.

For now we’re selling the book for $19.95 (the cost to print it and have it shipped to me is $6), so the net profit on the book is basically $14. Split three ways, we’d each get $4.67. So for every 100 we get in the hands of a family who needs it, we would earn $467. My complete set of support materials to supplement the book is $159, so we’d each get $53 per sale or $5300 for each 100 we sold.

I feel confident that the materials I’ve developed can help save lives. But I know that other people have life-saving resources as well. We’ll also be reaching out and finding other books and support materials that can make a significant contribution to keeping a million men alive.

If you know of ones that you feel are valuable, please tell us. I believe this project is a win/win/win. The biggest win is helping to save the lives of a million men and enhance the lives of their families. I win by getting the satisfaction of helping others and bringing in a steady income stream to support me and my family and you win in the same way.

So, if that makes sense to you, here’s how to sign up. Ian can answer questions. You can email him at Ian@MenAlive.com. He will send you information to make it easy to let others know about what we’re doing.

Thanks for joining me in the KAMMA partnership.

Best wishes,

Jed

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: male depression, male stress, male suicide, men and stress, men's heatlh, stop stress, suicide

It’s Never Too Late to Heal the Father Wound: A 40 Year Journey

June 16, 2012 By JedDiamond 22 Comments

Many of us have been wounded by our fathers. For some we experienced abuse growing up. For others we dealt with neglect. For most of us, our fathers were absent physically or emotionally more than we would have liked. Many of our fathers died too soon.

The first wound occurred for me when I was five years old. My father, a writer like me, was having great difficulty making a living during tough economic times. He wrote in his journal:

Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work. Yes, it’s enough to make anyone blanch, turn pale and sicken.

Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain was about to descend.

Four days after that journal entry, he tried to commit suicide. The first wound occurred when I learned he’d wanted to die. “Why doesn’t he love me?” I thought. “Why does he want to get away from me?” I didn’t understand. He was 42 years old and I was 5. The wounds didn’t end there.

Camarillo State Hospital

My uncle Harry visited my father every Sunday and it was my job to accompany him. It was a two hour drive from our house in Los Angeles to the hospital outside of Oxnard. I knew we were getting close when we drove between a huge stand of eucalyptus trees that lined the road. The closer we got the more terrified I became. I wanted to see my father, but the other “inmates” were strange, sitting alone rocking or talking to themselves. Remember this was 1948 and a mental hospital wasn’t a great place to be.

I did my best to cheer my father up, but he was usually quiet, and interacted very little with me. Driving back my Uncle would tell me how glad my father was to see me and how much I helped him by being there. I hated going, but even then I was a “good little boy” and thought it was duty to be strong and do what I was told.

I went to Camarillo every weekend for a year until it became evident that my father didn’t know who I was. He’d look right through me and my Uncle would have to remind him that I was his son. I finally was allowed to stop going and I felt I was given a reprieve from the weekly wounding.

He’ll Never Leave. He’ll Die Here

The doctors told my mother that he’d never leave the hospital. His mental illness hadn’t improved and she could accept the fact that he needed to be taken care of the rest of his life. I started having nightmares about going crazy and being locked up for the rest of my life with my father. I didn’t tell anyone about the horrible dreams.

In school, particularly around holidays, like Father’s day, other kids would ask about my father. At first I would tell them he was in the hospital. But I was stymied when they wanted to know when he was getting out. I finally told them he was in a mental hospital and I didn’t know when he was getting out. I felt very ashamed to have a “crazy” father and the kids taunted me endlessly. When I changed schools in the third grade, I told anyone who asked that “my father is dead.”

But he wasn’t dead and we got a call from my Uncle one night telling us that my father had escaped from the hospital and police were out looking for him. My mother was terrified that he was coming to get me and so she sent me to live with neighbors. I lived there for a couple of weeks. And one day there was a knock on the door. It was my father. I hid under the bed and he finally went away. I knew he was out there somewhere and my mother continued to tell me to be careful. “There’s no telling what your father might do.” But he didn’t do anything. He disappeared. We never heard from him and gradually I concluded that he probably was dead.

A Ghost Attends My College Graduation

I graduated from U.C. Santa Barbara and had been accepted to U.C. San Francisco Medical School in the fall. I felt on top of the world. As I walked across the stage to shake hands and get my diploma, my hand turned to ice. I saw someone in the audience that reminded me of my father. It was a momentary glance and then he turned away. I was shaken to my core, but I didn’t tell anyone. A day later I got a letter in the mail from my uncle. He said he had run into my father by accident in Los Angeles and had given him the information about my college graduation. “He seemed OK,” my uncle wrote, “and he said he wanted to see you.” He also left his contact information in Los Angeles. “He goes under the name of Tom Roberts gave me a number where you can reach him.”

After I returned home for the summer, I called him at the number I had been given and we set up a meeting. I had a jumbled mixture of feelings. I longed for the father I had never known. I was afraid of his “craziness.” I felt I should help him. The first meeting went pretty well. He told me that he was a street puppeteer and I saw how much joy he brought putting his shows on around his neighborhood in Ocean Beach. But he still had an edge of anger, weirdness, and unpredictability.

I visited a number of times, but by the end of the summer he seemed to be becoming more and more agitated. I didn’t know what to make of him and I’m sure, unconsciously, I was going to medical school to find out what was wrong with him and how he could be fixed. I had planned a trip to Mexico before I began Medical School in the fall and my father suggested we spend a few days in San Diego before I took the bus on to Mexico City. Our time started off OK. He showed me parts of San Diego he liked, bought me a book of letters from Theo Van Gogh to his brother Vincent, and we went out for our last dinner before my planned departure in the morning. But when I got ready to go the next day, he became extremely agitated and angry and forbade me to leave. “You’re my son and you have to stay and take care of your father.” I was dumb struck. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. As I boarded the bus he screamed after me, “You’ll never be a good doctor, if you can’t even take care of your own father.”

Brief Encounters of the Wounding Kind

I headed for Mexico, badly shaken, but glad to get away from this “crazy man.” I wondered where the gentle, supportive father I was dreaming of having had gone. I had a great summer and started Medical School in the fall at U.C. San Francisco. I lasted less than a semester. I dropped out and enrolled at U.C. Berkeley in the school of Social Welfare. I took many years to deal with the curse hurled at me by my father. It took even longer to realize that he was probably right. Medicine wasn’t for me, but not because I wouldn’t take care of my father, but because I had to learn about taking care of myself.

He and I ran into each other unexpectedly four more times over the next fifteen years. Each time we’d spend a few days together and I thought maybe we would be able to have a real adult-to-adult, father-and-son, relationship. But each time it would end the same way. He would make some demand that I wouldn’t meet and he would scream at me, “You’re no son of mine. I disown you. Get out of my sight.” I had armored myself to the blows and they didn’t hurt as much, but they still struck home.

The Last Wound and the Courage to Heal

I hadn’t seen nor heard from him in over five years. When my first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, came out, it developed a wide-spread readership. I wrote about my father, his inner demons, and our wounding relationship. I got an email out of the blue: “I read your book and was very touched by what you said about your father and your relationship with him. I work at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco and I’m a nurse on the ward where your father lives. I think he’d like to make contact with you.”

I wrote back and said, I wasn’t so sure, given our history. But I wrote a letter to my father. For the first time I told him the truth and didn’t hold back my feelings:

Dear Dad,

I just learned that you are in the hospital and I’d like to come visit you. But things have to change. I’m tired of being blamed for your pain and I’m through with your angry outbursts when I don’t do what you want me to do. It was you who left me, remember? I was five yours old. All I’ve ever done was to try to love you and all you’ve ever done is reject me over and over. You are my father, but this is the last time I’m reaching out to you. I’m the only one in the family who makes any attempt to get through to you. If you keep acting like this, you’re going to end up a lonely old man. I’m through. It’s up to you.

I figured that would be the end of things for us. At least I could say I had done my best to connect with my father. But I’d done what I could do. I was totally surprised when I got a letter back and even more surprised with what it said.

Dear Jed,

No one has ever talked to me like that in my life. And you’re right. I have blamed you, the family, everyone for my own unhappiness. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I do want to see you and I promise to you that I will treat you well. Please give me another chance.

The End and the Beginning

I did go and see him and he did treat me well. The only exceptions were letters I would get which were written at 4 AM (he’d always but on the date and the time). He was depressed and would chastise me for having plenty of time to travel all over the world, but didn’t seem to have much time for your Dad. I didn’t get many of those. And they’d usually be followed by a much more positive letter written in the light of day. As a mid-life man I now understood something about the weariness, depression, and sadness that can hit us when we’re awake into the wee hours of the morning.

We spent 10 years together until he died at 89. He met my wife and children and put on puppet shows for them. He even came to a family reunion was able to heal a lot of wounds with his brothers and sisters. I would visit him at his little apartment in the Tenderloin District. I still remember our last walk together. The new San Francisco library had just opened and he wanted to leave a flower on the steps to thank all those who had helped bring the library into being.

It was a long walk and we took it one slow step at a time. He laid his flower on the steps and we sat on a bench to rest. Finally, he looked me in the eye, gave me a slow smile, and told me “It’s time to go home.” A week later he died.

At a gathering of friends and family I told the assembled group: “By the standards of society, my father was not a success. He didn’t make a lot of money. He was labeled as mentally ill. He liked to live among people that society pretends do not exist.” Someone read one of his last poems, “Because of you,” said one, old madness has become new meaning. Because of you, my tongue is no longer lead.”

Happy Father’s Day. May all our souls heal from our father wounds. It’s never too late.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpstorm/1516351219/lightbox/

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: father and son, father's day, fathers, male stress, male suicide, men and stress, suicide

The Masculine Mystique and Male Depression: Embracing Your Vocation of Destiny

May 17, 2012 By JedDiamond 13 Comments

There is something amiss with men today, and I’m still trying to figure it out. I’ve been working with men, and the women who love them, for more than 40 years. Actually, I’ve been on a quest to understand what is happening to men since 1948. I was five years old that year and my father was 42. I knew he was unhappy, but I never understood what troubled him. He would disappear for long periods of time and when he was home he seemed irritable and angry much of the time. My mother was perpetually worried—about him, about me, about money, about the state of the world.

The Masculine Mystique

I still remember the day my mother told me my father had been hospitalized. She might have been crying, but she covered her emotions and simply told me my father was in a hospital. She never explained exactly why he was there or when he would be coming home. It was years later, when I was already in graduate school, that I found out he had tried to commit suicide. My father was a writer and had boxes of journals with plays, poetry, radio shows, and short stories of all kinds. I had read many of them, but they were hand-written and not easy to decipher. When I came across a big box with personal journals I read them with a mounting excitement and apprehension.

Here is a note from my father’s first journal, written when he was his old self, full of hope and joy for life:

“I feel full of confidence in my writing ability. I know for certain that someone will buy one of my radio shows. I know for certain that I will get a good part in a play. Last night I dreamt about candy. There was more candy than I could eat. Does it mean I’ll be rewarded for all my efforts? Has it anything to do with sex?”

Journal number three was written a year later. The economic depression of the time and the depression going on within his mind had come together. His entries are more terse, staccato, and disheartening. I still get tears when I feel how much was lost in such a short time.

“June 4th:

August 15th:

Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.

November 8th:

The Feminine Mystique: The Problem That Has No Name

I’ve been reading Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard. In the book Hubbard, talks about those key figures that had influenced her personal and professional life. The two primal people she mentions, the psychologist Abraham Maslow and feminist author Betty Friedan, also had a profound influence on me.

The Feminine Mystique

I was in college when I read The Feminine Mystique. I still have my original copy written in 1963 with a quote of support from anthropologist Ashley Montague, “the wisest, sanest, soundest, most understanding and compassionate treatment of contemporary American woman’s greatest problem.” In her book she talked about the fact that in the years following World War II American women seemed to have it all. She described “the American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the angers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had true feminine fulfillment.”

Yet, with all that she had—a husband, children, a nice house, T.V. and new “labor-saving devices,” she was becoming increasingly unhappy. In the secret confines of her heart and soul she knew there was more to her life than a husband, house, and children; and she felt ashamed for wanting more when she had so much. “She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction,” said Friedan, “that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was taking about.” When she’d go to a psychiatrist for help, he didn’t understand either. Until Friedan called it “the feminine mystique,” it was a “problem that has no name.”

Barbara Marx Hubbard remembers her reaction to The Feminine Mystique. “When I read that book, I realized that I was depressed because I had accepted the role of wife and mother as my exclusive identity….Once I read Betty Friedan, I was encouraged by one major thought: I knew I wasn’t alone. And I wasn’t willing to accept this depression as normal for me. The meme of the feminine mystique liberated and encouraged me to keep seeking.” She shared the feelings of so many women of that time. “So much was given to me, yet there was this feeling of depression caused by a loss of identity—a deep longing for something more.”

The Masculine Mystique: Why Men Are Angry and Depressed

It doesn’t take social science research to prove that men are angry and depressed. One measure of this trend is the increase in the rates of homicide and suicide we see in males. According to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), homicide rates for males are 3 to 4 times higher than they are for females. Among persons aged 20–24, the male homicide rate is 6 times higher than it is for females and it is much worse among minorities than among whites. For those ages 10-19, the homicide rate is 10 times higher for blacks than for whites.

Differences in suicide rates are even more dramatic, according to the CDC. Overall, males kill themselves at rates that are 4 times higher than females. But as with homicide, certain groups are even more vulnerable. The suicide rate for those ages 20-24 is 5.4 times higher for males than for females of the same age. In the older age groups suicide is predominantly a male problem. After retirement, the suicide rate skyrockets for men, but not for women. Between the ages of 65-74 the rate is 6.3 times higher for males. Between the ages of 75-84, the suicide rate is 7 times higher. And for those over 85, it is nearly 18 times higher for men than it is for women.

Why are men so unhappy? The Feminine Mystique told women that they should be satisfied with being wives, mothers, and homemakers. The Masculine Mystique told men that they should be happy to compete with other men to find a woman and then compete with other “breadwinners” to create ever greater material wealth for themselves and their families. We were told that “he who dies with the most toys, wins” and “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Both women and men become depressed trying to fit into roles that no longer work for us.

Men are losing out on three fronts. First, as women become more self-sufficient, men don’t feel they are needed as the sole “breadwinner.” Second, as the economy continues to move from one based on continued material growth to one based on sustainable living, more males are losing their jobs. Third, as stresses from economic and ecological imbalances continue to increase, men are no longer able to succeed in love and work. More women are seeking divorces than ever before and more men are stuck in dead-end jobs working longer and longer hours for less and less pay.

Anti-depressants and psychotherapy aren’t the answer. Both the feminine mystique and the masculine mystique would have us believe that we are depressed because there is something wrong inside us—with our brains, our serotonin levels, or self-esteem. The “experts” tell us that we need to take something or do something to better fit into the world as we know it. Liberation for men and for women requires that we break free of the old constraints and find our true purpose and direction in life. Depression isn’t merely an illness. It is a wake-up call from the soul.

Depression is More About Loss of Love Than Loss of Serotonin

We’ve all seen the pharmaceutical ads for the latest antidepressants. They show two nerve fibers greatly magnified with a few little black dots representing the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the synapse between the nerves. The ad informs us that too little serotonin causes depression and when we take their anti-depressant we immediately see many more little dots of serotonin flooding the synapse and connecting to the next nerve. But as usual, there is more to the story than the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe.

Depression is About Loss of Love

Andrew Solomon is a well-known writer who has dealt with depression in his own life. Although he acknowledges that anti-depressants can be of help to some people who suffer, he describes the problem in much different terms than the simplified view we see in the ads. In his comprehensive book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, he begins the book this says: “Depression,” says Solomon, “is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself….In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.”

The Male Vocation of Destiny: How to Love Ourselves, Each Other, and Embrace Our Calling in Life

Many men are ready to shed old roles, but don’t know what it means to be a good man in these changing times. Barbara Marx Hubbard says we must embrace our “vocation of destiny.” I suggest that our work requires that we learn to devote ourselves to three, inter-related, grand, causes.

We must learn to love and accept ourselves just the way we are.
We must learn to love our partner (wife, spouse, lover, or “special someone”)
We must learn to love and embrace our calling in life.

Part of the masculine (and feminine) mystique is that men must be a certain way and women must be different. In fact, it tells us that the very things that men must be women cannot be and vice versa.

For instance, psychologist Ann Neitlich says that men must be and women cannot be: Cool, stoic, economically powerful, physically strong, logical, aggressive, athletic, hairy, muscular, outspoken, rugged, and tough.

She says that men cannot be and women must be: Nurturing, tender, feeling, loving, beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, nice, sweet, hairless, quiet, giving, and apologetic.

It’s not easy going against the mystique of masculinity, but we must do so if we are going to truly love ourselves. “When I get to heaven,” said the Hasidic rabbi Susya shortly before his death, “they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?’” The first grand cause is to learn to love ourselves.

When I first heard Ann Neitlich talk about the things that women must be and the things that men cannot be, I wasn’t surprised to hear words like “beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, and hairless.” But I was surprised to hear words like “tender, feeling, and loving” included. But the more I thought about it, I realized it was true. Even qualities as important and universal as these, we are taught are for women, not for men.

I hate to admit it, but learning to love my wife and even my children at the same level that my wife loves me and our children, has been a real challenge. The second great cause of our lives is to learn to love those we are closest too. If we’re not married or “in relationship,” we all have someone special in our lives that we need to love more fully and unconditionally.

Finally, we have to learn to embrace and love our calling in life. I believe that we each have a calling, something that goes far beyond our job or career, something that we were born to do. It isn’t always easy to find, embrace, and love, but we must do so if we are going to be the men we’ve always wanted to be. Barbara Marx Hubbard says, “So, the question for each of us is, ‘what is my unique way of expressing my essence that is both self-rewarding and of service to others?”

I’ve found that for many of us our calling emerges out of our wound. It was my father’s attempted suicide when I was five that started me on the path of my life’s calling. It wasn’t always obvious to me, but became more and more clear that my calling has to do with awakening the masculine soul and helping men, and the women who love them, to live long and well on this beautiful planet we all share.

As men, we must come home to the essence of who we are in order to love ourselves, our partner, and our calling. We live at an important transition time in human history. An old way of life is coming to an end and a new path is opening before us. David C. Korten, author of The Great Turning calls it the transition from Empire to Earth Community. Psychologist and philosopher Sam Keen puts the challenge we face simply:

“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1.   The new human vocation is to heal the Earth.
2.   We can only heal what we love.
3.   We can only love what we know.
4.   We can only know what we touch.”

Are you ready to step up and embrace the challenge to accept and love yourself? Are you ready to reach out to others and love more fully and unconditionally? Are you ready to seek out and embrace your life’s calling? Let me hear from you. We can help each other on our journey. As my friend Joseph Jastrab reminds us, “The world needs a man’s heart.”

Jed

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, male anger, male depression, male mortality, masculinity, men's health, stress, suicide

3 Little Known Stressors Killing Men and the Women Who Love Them

May 1, 2012 By JedDiamond 20 Comments

It’s no secret that stress levels are on the rise. Much of our present-day stress involves our minds going around and around worrying about what could happen. “Stress—or as I like to think of it, the mind that’s running on overdrive—is now considered to be a leading factor in numerous illnesses,” says Woodson Merrell, MD, chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center and author of The Source. “By some estimates, up to 80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced.”

Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable. We see that in the fact that men die sooner and live sicker than do women. A chart that I shared in my last post is worth sharing again. It contains statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

These statistics show, for instance, that for every 100 women who die of heart disease 150 men die. For every 100 women who commit suicide 400 men kill themselves and for every 100 women who are killed in a homicide 390 men are killed.

Since we know that stress is implicated in most causes of death, what are the most common stressors? We often think of such things as time pressures, unhealthy lifestyles, traffic jams, and financial worries. But major new research reported by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, indicates that more important stressors are ones we probably are not even aware exist.

The Three Killer Stressors Few People Know About

If we take a moment to think about it, the stress that impacts us the most strongly have to do with other people, particularly those who are close to us. Wilkinson and Pickett say that “the most powerful sources of stress affecting health seem to fall into three intensely social categories.”

Trauma experienced when we were children.
Low social status.
Lack of friends.

Early Trauma Affects Health Years After It Occurs

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study has demonstrated that childhood experiences affect adult health decades after they first occur. The ACE Study is a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego. They found that childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other adverse experiences are common. Almost two-thirds of study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more.

Further, it was found that each adverse childhood experience increased the risk of health problems later in life. For instance, compared to people with an ACE score of 0, those with an ACE score of 4 or more were twice as likely to be smokers, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs, and 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Low Social Status Is Stressful

Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, both psychologists at the U.C.L.A. found that the stressors that most impacted our health were ones that threatened our sense of self-worth in the eyes of others. They collected findings from 208 published reports of experiments in which people’s cortisol (stress hormone) levels were measured while they were exposed to an experimental stressor.

They classified all the different kinds of stressors used in experiments and found that “tasks that included a social-evaluative threat (such as threats to self-esteem or social status), in which others could negatively judge performance, particularly when the outcome of the performance was uncontrollable, provoked larger and more reliable cortisol changes than stressors without these particular threats.”

Lack of Friends Can Be a Real Killer

“All the usual risk factors for heart disease—smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and a high-fat diet—account for only half of all cases of heart disease,” says heart expert Dr. Dean Ornish. “Every so-called lifestyle risk factor laid at the door of cardiovascular illness by the medical community has less to do with someone having a heart attack than does simple isolation—from other people, from our own feelings and from a higher power.”

Thomas Joiner, author of Lonely at the Top: The High Cost of Men’s Success, calls men “the lonely sex.” And it points out that it gets worse as we age. “Men’s main problem is not self-loathing, stupidity, greed, or any of the legions of other things they’re accused of,” says Joiner. “The problem, instead, is loneliness; as they age, they gradually lose contacts with friends and family, and here’s the important part, they don’t replenish them.”

As the suicide statistics verify, men often feel increasingly alone as they get older, even when they are surrounded by those who care about them. “A postmortem report on a suicide decedent,” says Joiner, “a man in his sixties read, ‘He did not have friends…he did not feel comfortable with other men…he did not trust doctors and would not seek help even though he was aware that he needed help.’”

The importance of friends reminds me of the refrain from Desperado by the Eagles. “You better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you…before it’s too late.”

What do you think? How have these categories impacted your stress levels?

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, male mortality, men's health, Reduce Stress, relationships, stress, stress reduction, Stressors, suicide

Help Me Keep A Million Men Alive

April 19, 2012 By JedDiamond 10 Comments

“If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.” Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

When I was five-years old and my father was forty-two, he tried to commit suicide. The stresses of trying to earn a living and provide for his family during difficult economic times overwhelmed him. Though he didn’t die physically, he was crippled emotionally and our lives were never the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father and to so many other wounded fathers.

According to the National Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, each year nearly 35,000 people kill themselves. 28,000 (nearly 80%) are male. Eleven times that number attempt suicide.

But suicide isn’t the only way men’s lives are cut short. “80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced,” says Woodson Merrell, MD, Chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center. Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable. According to social scientist Dr. Thomas Joiner, “Males experience higher mortality rates than females at all stages of life from conception to old age.”

Statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

“Over 330,000 lives would be saved in a single year in the U.S. alone if men’s risk of dying was as low as women’s,” says University of Michigan researcher, Daniel J. Kruger, PhD. “Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death,” says Kruger’s colleague, Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

I grieve for the men and boys whose lives are cut short and for the women and families left behind. I’ve been looking for a way to reduce stress that is simple to learn, easy to practice, scientifically sound, and, most importantly, effective. I’ve found what I’ve been looking for, have tested it extensively, and now want to get this life-saving information to as many men as I can. My new book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, gives men what they need to stop the stress that shortens lives and destroys relationships.

Do you know of other resources you believe could help save men’s lives? Let’s work together to make them available to men and the women who love them.

Here’s my simple idea: We know stress kills, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If we can reduce men’s risk of death to the same level as women’s, we can save nearly a million men within three years. Let’s get started. Please comment on this blog post with your idea or resource. You can also contact me directly at Jed@MenAlive.com

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: male mortality, men's health, stress, suicide

Why I’m Passionate About MenAlive

April 11, 2012 By JedDiamond 36 Comments

I do believe that our passion for our calling often comes from the wounds we experience in our lives. I still remember vividly hearing that my father was hospitalized following a suicide attempt. I was 5 years old. He was 42. At the time I had little idea of what had actually happened, but I knew my father wasn’t home and I was sad and scared. Somewhere deep inside I wondered what happened to him, did it happen to other fathers, and would it someday happen to me?

These questions weren’t far from my mind when I went off to medical school in 1965 following a heated argument with my father ending with him screaming, “You’ll never be a good doctor if you won’t even take care of your own father.” I went into, and dropped out of, U.C. San Francisco Medical school within a two week span and found the path to my calling when I enrolled at U.C. Berkeley’s school of Social Welfare.

The Ultimate Family Man

When my son, Jemal, was born on November 21, 1969, I made a vow to him that I would be a different kind of father than my father had been able to be for me and I would commit my life to helping make a world that was safer for fathers, their wives, and children. I now have five grown children and twelve grandchildren and I continue my commitment for their sakes and for all the other children and grandchildren in the world.

It was at Berkeley that I first learned that the suicide rate for men was 4 times higher than it was for women and later when I was getting my PhD in International Health that the suicide discrepancy was even higher as men got older. For men in their 60s the rate is 5 times higher than it is for women of the same age. For men in their 70s it is 8 times higher and for men in their 80s it is 14 times higher.

When I wrote my first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man in 1980, I touched on my father’s depression and suicide attempt. But the memories were still too painful and confused for me to write about it in depth. It wasn’t until my 10^th book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools that I could write about what happened to him, how it impacted me, and what I now know we can do to keep men alive.

Most of us know men who have killed themselves and we know even more men who didn’t die physically, but have died emotionally and spiritually. I have struggled with depression in my own life and have faced those bleak nights when I didn’t want to wake up, thought my family would be better off without me, and I just wanted the pain to go away. Too many men suffer in silence, or with irritability, anger, and rage. Too many women and children suffer because of the absence of their men.

My colleague Randy Nesse at the University of Michigan says, “if we could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”

Quite simply, this is why I have written the books I’ve written and created this website. I have a vision of keeping 1,000,000 men alive who would otherwise die in body, mind, or spirit. I know I can’t do it alone, but I know there are a lot of people in the world who share my passion and want to help men, and the women and children who love them, to live long and well.

I’ll be writing regular blog posts and look forward to engaging with you. It means taking some risks to be vulnerable and to open our hearts and minds to each other. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t easy writing this first blog. A little voice whispers, “no one will want to hear about these things…it’s too depressing…people are too busy with their own lives to respond.” But there is another voice that says, “We can save the lives of a million men and their families, if we share our experiences, expertise, hopes, and passions. What could be better than that?” I look forward to hearing from you.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: depression, men's health, stress, suicide

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