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Duke of Cambridge welcomes national task force on male suicide

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Today the Duke of Cambridge will join the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) at the launch of a unique coalition of front-line services to help tackle the issue of male suicide, the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK.

Convened by CALM, the coalition includes The Samaritans and front-line services from land, sea, and air: National Rail, Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), Highways England, British Transport Police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Chief Fire Officers Association and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives.

The aim is to pool all members’ substantial expertise in dealing with suicide at first-hand to develop a resource which helps men identify and support others, and themselves, when down, depressed or suicidal. The coalition will also include male grooming brand Lynx, one of CALM’s key partners.

The Duke of Cambridge welcomes the coalition, to which he will bring his own experience as a Search and Rescue helicopter pilot. He will attend the coalition’s inaugural round table discussion and then visit the RNLI Tower Lifeboat Station to meet first responders who deal with male suicide on a daily basis.

With an estimated daily cost of £20 million, male suicide accounts for 76% of all suicides in the UK. It has a huge impact not only on individuals and families, but also on the workforce of many frontline services and other organisations.

Jane Powell, CEO of CALM, said: “Suicide is frequently bracketed as the actions of the ‘mentally ill’. However, from our helpline we know that men who are suicidal are often tackling the kinds of life problems which can affect any of us, male or female, although it’s damned hard for men to admit to needing help or even find it. With the support of these male-dominated industries who know only too well the impact of suicide, we’re determined to normalise getting men help.”

Jonny Benjamin, who was stopped from jumping from a bridge by a stranger, said:“It’s great to see this fantastic coalition of emergency and transport agencies come together with CALM and Samaritans around the issue of male suicide. There is a real need for a resource to help men feel able to offer help, whether that’s a stranger on a bridge or your best mate.”

The male suicide prevention coalition is announced ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week (16 – 22 May) and the launch of Heads Together, a national campaign spearheaded by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry to promote mental wellbeing.

Founder of new men’s issues radio show on why he decided to join the debate

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This morning will see the first broadcast of PonderLab, a brand new men’s issues radio show, live on All FM 96.9 every Wednesday from 9-10am.

This week’s episode will take a look at the male mid-life crisis, celebrate Barbie’s birthday, and see how the show’s presenter deals with the shock of a new start at the gym, plus more besides.

Here the show’s producer and presenter, Paul Davies, explains why he believes there is a need for more platforms such PonderLab to address the issues facing men.

I’ve been asked why I’ve decided to make a radio show/podcast about men’s issues. Well it’s simply because there isn’t much out there in popular culture that really engages with men. It’s also become apparent that men’s issues have become a subject of much derision. To be honest, there isn’t enough being done to challenge the status quo. Meanwhile issues like male suicide continue to rise and misinformation spreads. So here is the full story as to why I wanted to debate men’s issues…

I’m not an anything…

I often go through little bouts of insomnia where I end up surfing the internet for nothing in particular. Recently I’ve discovered the oh-so-magical world of radical feminism, neo-masculinity, social justice warriors and men’s rights activists. On one side we have people who claim that you hate women if you are not a feminist. On the other we’ve got men getting in touch with their alpha status in a bid to stop being a “pussy”. I would like to be a million miles away from both of these groups. For some reason we’re all being coerced into nailing our colours to a mast. To have a point of view that falls outside these polarized ideologies makes me a ‘weak beta male that wants to deny women their rights’. I’m nothing of the sort. Let me explain.

Women have battled hard to get rights. The right to vote and the right to fair pay are two very good examples. It blows my mind that people had to go out onto the streets and demand these rights. I was taught about it at school, I’ve seen films about it (“Made in Dagenham” being a fantastic example) and I’ve read so many accounts about suffrage. I think we forget these things at our peril. But there are struggles that we have forgotten and they have put the equality debate at a disadvantage.

Women over the age of 30 got the right to vote in 1918. It was only 34 years prior that male suffrage entitled men paying an annual rental of £10 or all those holding land valued at £10 their right to vote.  It sill meant that 40% of adult males were still without the vote. The same act that granted women the right to vote in 1918, abolished property and other restrictions that affected men.  The story that I believed for much of my adult life ignored the suffrage of men and that alarms me. Why is it that we seem to only get half of the story?

Self-censorship

It’s only from doing a bit of research for this article that I discovered that the majority of men suffered the same inequality as women when it comes to voting rights. The interesting thing is that when I think about that fact, my stomach lurches. There is an internal self-censorship that tells me that I must not demean the idea that women have suffered in their struggle for equality. By acknowledging that working class men also faced discrimination, a part of my brain feels like I have committed a hate crime. I don’t feel comfortable. Sadly that’s because the narrative that I am familiar with is that men are the perpetrators and women are the victims. But, as I’ve discovered, it’s not as clear cut as that.

The fight for rights

When you look at the hard won rights of the worker in the UK, both men and women had to fight for them. There is no denying that it took longer for women to catch up, but working class men have never had it easy themselves. Those with power and money have fought hard to keep a divide between them and the lower classes. Let’s not forget those women in high society that were anti-suffrage. The fight against inequality should be against the establishment and not against men. The average man in the street has no power over women, nor does he want it. I’m not a feminist, but I believe that women should be treated equally. I believe that men should also be treated equally too.

Some are more equal than others

So here we are. After years of fighting and campaigning both women and men should be applauded for the steps forward in equality. Sadly the struggle that men have faced has been widely forgotten or disregarded. The struggle of the working class man isn’t a narrative that sits comfortably alongside feminism. This is because feminism relies on the narrative that men have had it easy. We didn’t have to fight for the vote, we didn’t have to fight for a living wage, we didn’t have to fight for equality in the workplace. But here’s the thing… We did. It’s just that my teachers forgot to tell me about that. Films don’t celebrate unfashionable male suffrage. According to popular culture – it didn’t happen. But now men are starting to talk about their own equality and the issues that face them.

Come on… Men have all the rights… Don’t they?

Do men have all the rights?  No. They don’t. But some feminists seem to think so. Type in “White Male” into Google. It will do the familiar auto-complete based on widely searched terms. In all cases it seems to add the word “privilege”. This is because many (if not all) feminists believe that white men were born into privilege. Most of the men in my family, including myself, we’re born into an ex-mining community with no investment, jobs or future. I could look forward to a life of unskilled low-paid work or take a far more risky path. I left my home with no money and no employment. I was technically homeless while I tried desperately to find somewhere to live in Manchester. Did being white and male open any doors for me? No! Here’s why.

It’s hard to find demographic data on homelessness, but the figures from 2011 show that 84% of the homeless are men. Over half of those who are homeless are white (55%). I don’t think anyone who sleeps rough would consider themselves to be privileged. If you add into the mix my history of depression and suicide I fall into a very familiar pattern of homelessness. At the time I was doing a mixture of rough sleeping and staying in B&B’s in Chester while I looked frantically for a place to stay. A friend offered me a spare room thankfully after just a week. Some aren’t so lucky.

In terms of suicide men aren’t privileged at all. Male suicide outweighs female by 4-1 and that gap is growing. These figures only take into account those who are successful in ending their lives. We don’t know how many men actually make an attempt or think suicidal thoughts. I don’t feel privileged that I’ve ended up in hospital more times than I care to remember because of my mental illness.

I’ve had to work damn hard to get the opportunities I’ve had. I’ve never had people give me things just for being a man or for being white. But feminists tell me that I’ve had it easier than them. They tell me that men, like me, conspire to keep them down. I do nothing of the sort. I have no logical reason to do so. But when it comes to inequality I hear arguments on both sides, both with their fair share of the legitimate and the idiotic.

Feminism is about the rights of men too!

While some may suggest that feminism is the fight for male equality as much as female equality, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Here is one very chilling example as to why feminism is not on the side of men. Even though a third of domestic abuse victims are men and the number of women convicted for domestic violence rose by 30% in the year to April 2015, from 3,735 to 4,866; when the issue of male victims was highlighted in The Independent one feminist blogger wrote: “Denying women’s much greater suffering as victims of domestic and/or sexual violence is a political act.” The thing is, no one denied anything of the sort. They gave the facts as they were. But the blogger felt compelled to debunk the facts, putting forward the age-old argument that women are the victims and men are the perpetrators. The use of the phrase “political act” in her blog is an irony lost on the author.  But what about the general discussion of men’s issues in society?  Well…

The 19th of November 2015 saw “International Men’s Day” take place — a day when we raise awareness of issues that men face. The date made headlines, but not for the reasons you might think. When a group of MPs suggested debating issues around the event they were met with derision. Jess Phillips MP found the idea laughable claiming that, “everyday is International Men’s Day.” Meanwhile, a group of students and staff at York University got a programme of events to mark the day cancelled. In fact feminists have derailed so many similar events across the world claiming that men’s freedom of speech is nothing short of misogyny.

You’re either with us or against us.

Some feminists argue that you are either with them or against them. I’m neither. I want to discuss the things that affect me in the way I want to. To claim that men don’t have the right to talk about men’s issues without acknowledging some non-existent hatred of women is nothing short of totalitarian thought. It’s as if we have to do what they want or they’ll deny us our right to speak, debate, think or even to be. That takes us to the other extreme. The rise of neo-masculinity — a group of people who are as fragile and damaged as the women they rally against. Meanwhile the rest of us are cannon fodder, sitting in the middle. We become the enemy of both for not choosing a side.  But there is a side that we can all choose, one that doesn’t favour race, gender, sexuality, age or nationality.  It’s called Egalitarianism – which is the belief in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities: a fairer, more egalitarian society.

So to everyone fighting for equality and their rights — more power to you! But a word of warning: Don’t scapegoat an entire group of people for the actions of a minority. Don’t deny anyone their right to debate. Don’t claim to be campaigning for my rights when I’m big enough to do it myself. Finally, do not think that because I don’t identify in a certain way that I am automatically your enemy.

This is why I chose to start a debate about men’s issues. I want a positive platform that’s out there in the open. It’s not behind closed doors so you can keep an eye on what we’re up too. It’s sad that we have to do it like this, but it will help. I hope that the show can engage with the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the lonely and everyone in between. The most important thing I want to say is…

We’re all in it together.

To read more of Paul’s writing and learn more about PonderLab, visit the show’s blog and Facebook page here and here

Are shaming men for weakness, suicide and resistance to International Men’s Day connected?

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The increasing problem of male suicide has been in the news a lot in recent weeks.  Across all the articles that have been written on the subject, one word keeps re-appearing: “shame”.

For example, we hear that men feel ashamed of expressing their emotions and we are reassured that there should be no shame in experiencing depression.  Shame is mentioned often but rarely is it properly examined.  Shame, by its very nature, is something that we do not want to discuss.  As a man who is recovering from mental health problems and who has struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past, I have had to face up to shame and discuss it in detail.  It has been a painful and at time’s frightening process but one that has been key to my recovery.

I think that we, as a society, need to start having a discussion about shame and the dark places that it can lead to when people’s feelings of shame get out of control.  When we look at the problem of male suicide and men’s mental health in general, we need to look at how our society sets up young men to experience potentially unmanageable levels of shame and we need to work together to build a society where this is no longer the case.

Profoundly frightening

Shame is an incredibly complicated emotion and I’m not a psychologist so my input here will be very limited.  My aim is only to share my own experience of shame, my reflections on it and how I am reducing its negative influence on my life in the hope that my story will help others and will do something to bring the problem of male shame to the forefront of the discussion.

When shame really takes hold of you it’s a profoundly frightening and painful experience.  It’s the sense that you are deeply flawed.  It’s a nagging voice that tells you that you are not clever enough, not strong enough, not attractive enough, not charismatic enough, not capable enough.  It’s the feeling that makes you sink into despair or lash out when something reminds you of how flawed you feel.  It’s the sense that you are bad, worthless and unlovable and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Your basic human need to be loved and accepted feels like a sick joke.

You don’t talk about how you are feeling not because you find it embarrassing or uncomfortable or don’t want to make a fuss, but because you feel that your entire sense of self will disintegrate if you fully acknowledge how you feel about yourself.  You can’t grow or develop yourself because it’s too painful to acknowledge even your slightest imperfection.  To fail at something is so painful that you can’t learn from your mistakes.

You certainly can’t ask for help.  If anyone notices you are struggling and offers help then they have effectively pointed out your imperfections and so you will push them away.  You spend long, exhausting hours chasing your thoughts in circles trying to build some sense of self-worth.   If you made a mistake you can’t let it go so you try to convince yourself that it was because you were distracted or weren’t really interested in what you were doing anyway since you had more important things to do.  If someone didn’t like you then you try to convince yourself that they’re an [insert expletive here] anyway.

‘Society sets boys and men up to feel shame in a particularly destructive way’

You might look for shortcuts to achieve something that would prove to yourself that you are wonderful really but each shortcut leads nowhere – it’s another failure that fuels that nagging voice telling you that you really are hopelessly flawed after all.   A life lived like that is incredibly painful so you start to look for escape.  Escape can take the form of fantasy, perhaps of being the unflawed person that you think you must be or the fantasy of being loved in a way that would make the pain of being you go away.  Escape can take the form of zoning out in front of the TV, drinking until you aren’t aware of your feelings anymore or any number of ultimately unhealthy activities.  In extreme cases, escape can take the form of suicide.

Of course, women as well as men can feel like that so why do I say that shame is a particularly important topic when we’re look at men’s mental health?  It’s because society sets boys and men up to feel shame in a particularly destructive way.  Our society has, quite rightly, spent much time and effort sending girls and women the message that they can be strong, capable and successful.  We have, however missed the fact that we have kept on sending boys and men the messages that they must always be strong, capable and successful.

The first of these messages is helpful and empowering, the second is potentially disastrous since it sets boys up from a very young age to have unrealistic expectations of themselves which can lead them to feel unhealthy levels of shame when they are unable to live up to those expectations.  And this shame will be reinforced by those around them.  Boys will be bullied if they are not always strong, men will be dismissed as “losers” if they are not always capable and successful.

‘We need to foster empathy for men’

Even in the way that society seems to value boys, it doesn’t get it right.  Boys are too often seen as little potential doctors, lawyers, businessmen or sports stars to be.  This may look like encouragement and support but when it gets in the way of seeing boys as children, it can become positively harmful and stops them from growing and learning.  A father’s shame of failing to live up to the unrealistic expectations placed on him can be passed on in the form of unrealistic hopes and dreams for his son – shame masquerading as nurturing.

We miss all of this because we have assumed that because the messages that girls received from society for so many generations were disempowering, then all of the messages that boys received from society must have been empowering.  It is because people cannot see past this assumption that they react with confusion, silence or mockery when boys start to fail at school and men’s mental health suffers.

When people talk about the “fragile male ego” they usually don’t realise that they are actually talking about the consequences that men suffer from having grown up in a world that feels almost designed to induce shame in them.

Psychologists will tell you that a key tool in combatting unhealthy shame is empathy.  Empathy is when people understand your pain, accept you as you are and help to create an environment in which you can learn to accept yourself and realise that you are ok despite your imperfections.

Phrases like “fragile male ego” and comments like “we don’t need an international men’s day because every day seems like one” are unhelpful precisely because they contribute to a culture where there is little empathy for men.  It’s my hope that we can use International Men’s Day 2015 as an opportunity to rebuild some of that empathy for men and start to heal the epidemic of male shame.

Dealing with my unhealthy levels of shame has changed my life.  Not all of my problems have gone away but without the influence of shame, I can now identify those problems and work on them, try things and fail, learn from my mistakes and grow, relax and enjoy life and connect with others in a way that I was never able to before.

The author is an aspiring blogger with a particular interest in mental health, culture and how the two interact.  He was inspired to take the leap and start putting his thoughts out there by the recent discussions about International Men’s Day. As a man who is recovering from mental health issues himself, he is especially interested in how culture interacts with mental health for men in modern day western society. He hopes that by sharing his personal experience and reflections he will be able to contribute to the discussion and encourage others in their journey towards recovery.  He also enjoys film, music, socialising, hiking and he has recently learned to enjoy the gym and keeping fit. He also loves dogs.

Do you want to make preventing male suicide a national health priority? To help raise awareness about this emergency join the International Men’s Day social media shout out by clicking here

How a conflicted and tragic father-son relationship launched the UK’s only health and wellbeing centre for vulnerable men

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Earlier this month an extraordinary couple from Burton upon Trent opened a unique and ground breaking new male-only health and wellbeing centre to support some of the most vulnerable men in their community.

The Eaton Foundation, which encompasses mental health, addiction, homelessness and life skills support under one roof, is the first and only such centre in the UK specifically targeted at men.

The centre has been met with warm and widespread local and national media coverage, but what the reports mentioned only in passing, was the complex and tragic father-son relationship that was its inspiration.

Alex and Jessica Eaton were driven to establish the centre after the death of Alex’s father two years ago, who despite suffering from alcoholism and complex mental health problems, had repeatedly fallen through the cracks of local health and social care.

‘He would drink just to function’

Alex spoke with insideMAN shortly before the centre opened about the conflicted relationship he had with a father who he loved deeply despite his destructive behaviour and the bleak circumstances that led to his death aged just 52.

“He’d suffered from mental health problems, substance abuse, homelessness, everything really. But because my dad was drunk quite a lot of the time, they would say it was his own choice and they couldn’t help him.”

“He was vulnerable, what I mean by that, he was an alcoholic, he was chemically dependent on his alcohol.

“On pay day, he would get up, go to the shop and he would buy a big litre bottle of 20-20 and he would down that and he would buy two of those gold labels too, just to function in the morning.”

When trying to get his father help, Alex tried the local rehab centre, local crisis team, local mental health team, none of whom could help, or had six month waiting lists.

‘I thought, I’ll never be like you’

“When nothing else worked and my dad was coming round causing lots of trouble, we had to go to the police.”

The police then put him in a mental health unit.

Despite his father’s destructive behaviour Alex loved his father and invited him to come and stay with him and his girlfriend — Alex would ask him not to drink in the house, but his father would hide the alcohol and drink anyway. His behaviour eventually took a heavy toll on Alex’s relationship with his girlfriend.

Alex says they had a deeply complex and conflicted bond – in the end his father became a role model for what he never wanted to become. Alex doesn’t drink or smoke, let alone do drugs.

“One thing my dad said to me, ‘you’re just like me’, and I thought, I’ll never be like you.”

Dearth of male-focused services

He believes a major reason why his father was unable to get the helped he needed, was because he was a man and that the lack of male-focused services was compounded by the pressures men feel under to be stoic and cope alone.

“We’ve always seen there’s a gap in service provision for men, it seems like in this day and age, women and children are favoured over men.”

“To be a man, you’re always told you have to be strong, kind of be emotionless.”

“Basically, even women think men have to be the ones who go out to work, to be strong, basically to be the structure of the family, that’s the expectation that’s been put on us as men.”

“I think that absolutely when men do suffer with mental health problems, or do suffer with addiction, they feel it’s better to try and hide it.”

‘He would have been proud’

“I think men are scared of admitting that there is something wrong, because they don’t want to appear weak, in case they get laughed at or mocked.”

Alex’s father over-dosed at a homeless hostel after drinking heavily and taking a combination of prescription medication and illegal drugs.

A week after his father’s death, Alex was sitting down with his wife discussing what provision there was for men in his father’s position in their area, he says “there was no centre in our area for men, basically, so we just thought, why don’t we open our own organisation and it went from there”.

“We provide a holistic support package. With the complex mental health problems we come across, you can’t afford to be one-dimensional.”

“You can give someone counselling for years and years, but if you have housing problems, with bailiffs coming through the door, it will never go away, you need a whole package to get round those issues.”

“When we first opened the charity, we did feel no-one took us seriously, but since we’ve been gaining momentum, we feel we’ve opened a lot of people’s eyes locally and even nationally, and it’s even got to the stage where people want one of these mental health centres in their own area, and this one is not even open yet. We’ve had a lot of local support”

“At the end of the day, I know my dad would have been really proud of what we’re doing and that we’re helping other people like him.”

“Our target this year was to see 100 individual men, but are now looking to help even more.”

By Dan Bell

Image: The Eaton Foundation

‘More UK men have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers killed since 1945’

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More men in the UK have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945, according to a new edition of Newsweek magazine dedicated to the issue of male suicide.

The edition, which is published alongside an in-depth e-book on the crisis, follows new figures by the ONS that show men are now killing themselves at their highest rate for a decade.

According to Newsweek “Across Europe, men are around four times more likely to die by suicide than women” and suicide kills “three times more people than road accidents, more than leukaemia, more than all infectious and parasitic diseases combined.”

“More than 6,000 people in the UK died by suicide in 2013; 78% of them were men.”

Failure of services

In addition to a stark and detailed breakdown of the figures, the magazine outlines the failure of UK authorities to address the crisis.

The magazine reports, “In 2002, following the release of a report, The Sadness of Young Men, detailing Scotland’s disproportionately high male suicide rate, the Scottish government announced its intention to reduce suicide by 20% in the space of 10 years. When 2013 came around, rates were down by 19%.”

In London in November last year, a community-based mental health facility considered a lifeline to its members, was threatened with closure in a cost-cutting drive by the local council.

‘Provide and protect’

In early January, with the council’s decision still pending, one of its male members threw himself under a train, the magazine reports.

Newsweek quotes a number of the leading figures in the UK movement to address men’s mental health, including Jane Powell of the Campaign Against Living Miserably and Dr Martin Seager of Men’s Minds Matter.

Seager told the magazine that there is a danger in approaches to tackling men’s mental health that tells them they should me more like women.

He told Newsweek: “The way I look at it, if men have evolved as fathers, protectors and survivors, they are going to feel life is worth living to the extent they can provide and protect.”

Image credit: Newsweek

Article by Dan Bell

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Rapper Professor Green tells the BBC about his father’s suicide

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Rapper Professor Green has made a BBC film about his fathers’ suicide to increase awareness of suicide as the biggest killer of men aged 20-45 and raise funds for male suicide prevention charity, the Campaign Against Living Miserably.

He told the BBC: “Despair. It’s a powerful feeling, when your heads in a state it’s easy to feel like you are the only one in the world who’s suffering.”

Green talks about the difficult relationship he had with his dad, how at 18 they stopped talking, but then five years later he tried to arrange a meeting, but they ended up arguing and the last words he said to his dad were “I hate you”.

‘Suicide consumes everyone around that person’

He says: “The terrible thing is, I never got to see him, because a few months later he killed himself. The moment I found out my dada had taken his own life is still as clear today as it was the moment it happened.

“I kept wondering why no-one had seen it coming, I still find it quite hard to articulate how I felt. It’s been six years since it happened and weird thing about grieving is that it never stops.

“Suicide is now the biggest killer of men aged between 20 and 45 in the UK. Bigger than heart disease, bigger than road accidents and bigger than murder.

“The pain of a suicide ripples out to consume everyone around that person.

‘I still don’t know what was going through dad’s head’

“Communication can be a big problem between men. We don’t like to talk about our issues, we think it makes us look weak, or we think we can sort it all out ourselves.

“I still don’t know what was going through my dad’s head when he killed himself and I never got a chance to say a proper goodbye or tell him that I loved him.

“I wish there had been someone he felt he could have confided in or reached out to. That’s why I’m part of a campaign called CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably – an important charity that works hard to help prevent male suicide.”

The film also features comedian Jake Mills, who tells the story of his own attempted suicide and the story of the Stringer family who lost their musician son Hector when he was only 18 years old.

In 2013 6,233 people took their own lives in the UK, 4,858 of these were men. The film is available on BBC iplayer here.

Photo courtesy: Cristian Stefanescu

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Talking: The Ultimate Weapon Against a Leading Cause of Male Deaths

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Josh Rivedal lost his father and grandfather to suicide and is a passionate advocate for improving men’s mental health.

—This is article #86 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

Men are willing to talk about just about anything—the size of their prostate glands, or how much Viagra they’re allowed to take—but they’re still not willing to talk about their mental health. If men want to live long, healthy and productive lives it’s absolutely crucial that the dialogue surrounding men’s mental health has to change.

I lost my father Douglas to suicide in 2009. Douglas lost his father Haakon to suicide in 1966. Each suffered from undiagnosed mental health conditions and each suffered in silence because of the stigma surrounding men talking about and getting help for mental illness.

Haakon—a Norwegian man who served in the Royal Air Force (35th Squadron as a tail gunner) in World War II—killed himself in 1966 because of the overwhelming post traumatic stress he suffered because of the war. Douglas, an American man who was chronically unhappy and abusive, may have been clinically depressed for a very long time, but my mother filing for divorce was a catalyst (not the cause) for his action in taking his own life.

There’s a relatively new case study in The Journal of Men’s Health that says that men are affected tremendously by divorce. They have higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and detach themselves from personal relationships and social support.

I nearly attempted suicide

In 2011, I had several catalysts for my own near-suicide attempt: the dissolution of a relationship with a long-term girlfriend (similar to a divorce), a lack of work, and fallout from my mother’s betrayal. I was in terrible emotional pain and unknowingly suffering from clinical depression.

My thought life took a downward spiral pretty fast. How did I get to such a dismal place in my life so quickly, just a month shy of my twenty-seventh birthday? Coming out of secondary school and high on optimism, I thought by the time I reached my mid-twenties I would have it all together. After a couple of years singing on Broadway (yes, I’m a theatre geek), I would have scored a few bit parts on Law & Order, and transitioned seamlessly from having my own television show, A-Team 2.0 as Mr. T’s long lost son, to being cast with Will Smith in the summer’s biggest blockbuster. After which, my getaway home in the South of France would be featured in Homes & Gardens, andmy face would grace the cover of The National Enquirer as Bigfoot’s not-so-secret lover. Not to mention, I’d have my perfect wife and perfect family by my side to share in my success.

But instead, I somehow only managed to perform in an assortment of small professional theatre gigs and on one embarrassing reality television show; and over the course of the previous eighteen months my father killed himself, my mother betrayed me and sued me for my father’s inheritance, and my girlfriend of six years broke up with me.

Talking doesn’t make you less of a man

This perfectly imperfect storm of calamity and crisis had ravaged my life… and I wasn’t talking about it to anyone. My silence led to crisis and poor decisions—to the extent that I was hanging out of a fourth story window.

Those men who came before me, Haakon and Douglas; each of them suffered their pain in silence too, because of stigma and I too felt that same stigma—like I’d be seen as “crazy” or “less of a man” if I talked about what I was going through.

Standing at the ledge of a fourth floor window, I realized I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to end my inner torment and emotional pain. And I needed to break the familial cycle. So I came back inside, took a risk and asked for help by calling my mother.

Over the next few months I continued to take more risks. I called old friends to tell them I needed their support. I started seeing a counselor. And no one ever told me I was crazy, stupid or a bad person. They told me they loved me and wanted to help me.

There is always hope

While recovering from clinical depression, I wanted to help youth and other men like me. So I wrote a biographical book and one-man play The Gospel According to Josh that talks in part about my father’s suicide and took it to secondary schools, universities and community centers all across the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia. With it, I talk about the importance of mental health and various means and methods of suicide prevention. Most of my audiences were and still continue to be women. One of the things I’ve found is that most men (not just the Rivedal men) have a difficult time talking about and getting help for their mental health or if they’re feeling suicidal. There seems to be some societal pressure that says, “You’re not a true man if you don’t have it all together, all the time.”

But I have a message for men everywhere that’s simple yet profound. There’s always hope and help out there for you. As a man who has suffered from deep, dark depression—the “Black Dog” as Winston Churchill called it—I can say from personal experience that this is not a character flaw or a weakness. It doesn’t make you any less of a man. In fact, by asking for help it makes you a stronger man. It gives you a fighting chance to improve your life and become the person you want to be. Reach out to your family and friends and ask for help. Nip it in the bud before it can turn into a crisis.

* * *

If you need a bit of help and don’t know where to turn, here are list of resources for suicide prevention and mental health in the US, UK, Australia, and around the world.

Additionally, for International Men’s Day on November 19, 2014, I’m having a live Google Hangout chat on male depression, suicide, and how and where to get help with MensLine Australia in Australia (details HERE), and MenBeyond50 in the United Kingdom (details HERE). We’ll be covering a lot and you can ask questions and it’s totally free.

–-Picture credit: Britt Reints

 

Josh Rivedal is a New York City based actor, author, playwright, and international public speaker on mental health and suicide prevention. He writes occasionally for the Huffington Post. He is author of the book The Gospel According to Josh and is taking in part in an online discussion about men’s mental health on international men’s Day (Wednesday 19th November 2014).

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Man Up, Man Down: a poem about male suicide

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Peter Raynard’s poem is inspired by the shocking statistic that 12 men a day kill themselves in the UK.

 

—This is article #67 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

 

Man Up, Man Down

One only ever got As at school
Two got expelled yet was nobody’s fool

Three fell out with his virtual world
Four fell out with his only girl

Five fought too long on foreign sand
Six couldn’t keep paying with cash in hand

Seven kept house, kept kids, kept calm
Eight cut a hundred lines on his arm

Nine had a lifelong wife that died
Ten was a man that never cried

Eleven was a man who everyone loved
Twelve was a man who’d had enough

It is fine to rhyme and be poetic
But twelve men down a day is tragic

—Picture credit: Elvert Barnes 

 

You can follow Peter Raynard on Twitter: @peter_raynard or @proletarianpoet

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Men can recover from the edge of suicide

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James Withey  founded the mental health website Recovery Letters after facing depression. Here he shares the inspiration behind the project.

—This is article #66 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

I’m sat on a chair in my room on a psychiatric ward; the sun is reaching through the branches of the tree behind me and daubing a beautiful light show on the wall. A year ago I was a Training Officer with a large charity delivering courses including the life saving ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) to groups of social care workers and now I’m on 15 min suicide watch.

Depression crept up behind me and broke me in 2011 after a series of events that made my soul collapse. I was fortunate in some ways. I had worked in counselling and social care all my life and knew that I was unwell; I also knew that I was entitled to support.

I had taught others about suicide; how men are more likely to die by suicide, how men want help but find it hard to find the services to match and that suicidal thoughts are temporary but feel permanent.

When I was first ill I spent four nights in the Maytree Sanctuary for the Suicidal in London which saved my life and gave me time to reflect on the notion of recovery. Until my time in Maytree only one mental health professional had told me I could recover from depression; this was a student nurse who was accompanying the full time workers and leaving the flat she turned, smiled and said, ‘James, you can recover from this.’ At Maytree I had a chance to think about this and the importance of hope.

This is what helped me

Depression tried to steal everything from me and temporarily succeeded. It took my career, my memory, my concentration, my confidence, my sense of humour, friendships, sleep, eating, motivation and one of my biggest losses was reading. I used to be an avid reader, a few novels a month and suddenly nothing, I couldn’t read a page, I couldn’t read half a page. I borrowed some books from the library but couldn’t get past the first sentence and the more I tried the more of a failure I felt.

What I wanted was to read small pieces of writing that would give me some hope that I could get through; I wanted to hear about other people’s experiences of emerging through the treacle like existence that is depression. This is how the idea of Recovery Letters came about because I wondered, if this would have helped me, would it would help others too?

Recovery Letters is a simple premise; people recovering from depression write a letter to those that are currently suffering. I wrote the initial letter and then used twitter to ask other people to write subsequent letters. The response has been incredible, including men who have explained that starved of sleep, late at night, the letters have helped them survive until the morning.

We need to help men in different ways

As a man I know the difficulties of opening up; after one disastrous phone call to a helpline at 3 a.m. where the helpline worker didn’t say anything to me, I vowed never to call again and that night took an overdose of sleeping pills. I’m not blaming that helpline worker who no doubt was anxious and unsure of what to say, it was maybe their first call and they just wanted to help. My point is that men need to be engaged in different ways, we need to understand how hard it is for men to open up. Our duty is to provide a variety of methods of support so that the right fit can be found.

Talking about suicide is also hard. When Stephen Fry was asked recently why he didn’t tell close friends about his feelings before a recent suicide attempt, he responded by explaining that it’s like admitting the most embarrassing and mortifying thing you could reveal, so big is the shame. “Think of your very best friend. Very, very best friend. Suppose you suddenly noticed you had a massive and really disturbing genital wart… would you show it to your very best friend?”

The Recovery Letters blog has been running since September 2012 and we now have dozens of letters on the site from people who have taken the time and effort to sit down and write to people they’ve never met. They benefit too, writing down thoughts, feelings and reaching out to others helps to cement one’s own recovery. No one is paid any money to write nor read the letters, yet everyone benefits.

I use the letters myself. My recovery is up and down, as most people’s is, and because depression blinds you to the truth I will often sit down and remind myself that if the people who wrote these letters are alive, living their lives alongside or after depression then I can do the same, and I do.

—Picture credit: Portland Prevention

You can read the letters here: therecoveryletters and follow on Twitter @RecoveryLetters. This article first appeared at the CALM website and is republish with permission of James Withey.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

When it comes to health, the male elephant is still outside the room

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For nearly 40 years, as a man personally and professionally, I have struggled uncomfortably with the issue of the “male elephant in the room”; in fact not even in the room, but outside the door.

My journey as a boy, son, young male, man, husband, father, single parent father, community worker, unemployed male, mental health service user, founder of a social enterprise, social entrepreneur, counsellor, psychologist, criminologist and grandfather, has been enlightening for me as a male. I have observed both in my own life and through observing the many thousands of people that have been fellow journeymen, that men in England are as much emotionally outside the door as they were in my childhood days.

— This is article #59 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys

Equality between men and women has radically changed in many ways but in one way it has not. According to research by Professor Brid Featherstone men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women and four times less likely to ask for help.

Men’s gender issues overlooked

Men are still only 10% of single parents which is a figure that has not really changed since I became one in 1987 — not by choice, but by chance and necessity. In my world of family mental health, men are still seen as the “problem” not the solution and often seen as the perpetrator of the “problem”. Fatherhood as a specific subject within children and families policy “yoyos” in and out of favour, whilst motherhood is still mainly in a saintly position.

My argument is not that men at times do not behave badly, or are not perpetrators and abusers, but that the gender issues that men and fathers face are not given the same recognition as those faced by women and mothers.

For example, if we take the sad issue of suicide, it is statistically clear that 75% of these deaths are men in UK, but this is not debated as a male issue. Men and depression does now get highlighted, but the NHS and the Government have not made the issue a high priority.

There have been some excellent reports at local, regional, and national level since 2010, but when I raise this issue with mental health commissioners they in the main see it as an added-value subject. This means that if we have some money at the end of the financial year, we will perhaps commission a report. Fatherhood is also in this relegation zone — there were an emerging number of father worker posts within children and families departments across England, but it appears that this add-on and non-statutory luxury is on the austerity cutting-room floor.

Men need to be empowered

My Time CIC — based in the West Midlands and strangely also now in Isle of Wight, which I founded 12 years ago and by some miracle still plods on like an over-active tortoise — still flies the flag for men and women to get parity and equality within mental health and family services.

A huge proportion of children in care are there due to the mental health problems of parents and as a consequence of domestic violence. This grave social and economic issue will not be resolved without the male elephant being invited firstly into the room and secondly engaged — whether or not society feels uncomfortable with this. There also has to be a strong focus on women’s, at times, unacceptable behaviour, and on promoting images of men that are positive role models and there are surprisingly many.

Men need to be empowered to take control of their issues and challenge men who are not behaving. It is our responsibility and right. This old elephant is very much sitting in the room.

Michael Lilley is founder and chief executive of My Time CIC (www.mytime.org.uk) which is part of the Richmond Fellowship Group (www.richmondfellowship.org.uk). Michael is currently working on establishing a Well-Being Hotel and Recovery Centre on Isle of Wight.

Reference: Talking Men – Healthcare Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal October 2012

Picture credit: Lucas Santana

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com.