My contribution to the mental health discussion

There is a cliché that men don’t open up and talk about their feelings.

They keep them “bottled up”, and “put on a brave face”. They are “stoic” and live “in denial”.

Women on the other hand are seen as being all about their “feelings” and emotional life, and that they are very good at discussing these things, especially with each other, in intimate detail. They have no hesitation, there’s no stigma attached, no embarrassment.

But it is suggested that if a man tries to pour out his heart, other men will consider him weak and mock him etc. So of course they don’t because it would be too embarrassing. So they hide their pain or depression or fears or doubts and end up becoming bitter, depressed and committing suicide, much more than women. Then people say “If only they had talked to someone! If only they had let others know we could have done something to save them!”

I’m just describing the popular perceptions here. I’m not saying that these are accurate descriptions of men and women. In fact I reject all unqualified generalisations.

But this is the general view of how men and women respectively manage their own emotions and mental health. So much so that there is a major government campaign in Australia these days called “R U OK?” which aims to encourage men to ask other men how they are going in case they are depressed or have something eating away at them.

From time to time we see the image above posted on social media.

I don’t think it is that simple. In fact I think it is a much more interesting problem (that has nothing to do with feelings or how badly I feel about people suffering mental health issues – so please don’t misunderstand me here.)

And I would respond by saying that it was not "this world" that "wrongly taught men" to do this. This is modern mumbo-jumbo bullshit. It’s actually just economics.

It is a mathematically inevitable outcome of the desire in men and women to form mutually satisfying relationships, combined with the fact that time, space and patience that each one has available to be the emotional support for the other is finite.?

It is a natural resource that must be managed economically and carefully. And men have to be very sparing. They cannot use up all of their credit because it leaves them sexually broke.

To put it another way,?there is not a woman alive (worth less than $200 per hour), who could listen to a FRACTION of the whinges I have bottled up. If it was "this world" that made men bottle up their emotions then all woman should get down on their knees and give a prayer of thanks to this world. Otherwise it would be hours and hours, droning on and on about regret and anxiety and desire and lack of fulfilment and when is enough? When has the world done the right thing by men?

Well nature has provided brilliantly for this, without the need for counselling or government programs. It’s called “women”. Women will indicate that the man approaches the limit by saying something like "ENOUGH! YOU NEEDY LOSER!"

If you think that sounds harsh, or that it would never be appropriate to say that, then you are arguing that women should be infinitely available to look after men, which would leave no time for the men to look after women.

But it’s OK, without all these modern clichés and government programs, men will learn to stop well before that ever happens, and in the process they will learn what the rest of their life needs to be, which is “strong”.

We all kind of want a friend or lover or spouse to love and be loved back, and part of that deal is that we want someone who will listen to us, and forgive our flaws, make us feel secure enough to talk about them, not laugh at us, and keep our confidence, to offer us encouragement as we try to fix them, celebrate with us if we succeed and soften the disappointment when we fail. That’s a healthy relationship

BUT, everything is economics. No one has infinite ability to do those things for another person, and no one should expect them to.

Their ability to do that reaches a limit. Sometimes the limit is the need for sleep, or to go to work, or the toilet etc. But mainly the limit is that eventually the listener starts to think to themselves

“Ok, when do I get my turn? I’ve got issues too. Are you going to listen to me? If I don’t speak up soon you are going to think that I simply have no problems and that the counselling can go all one way. So AT VERY LEAST I need to remind you that I also have some pain that you could help with, just to get it on the record!”

and of course the longer it goes on the more tired they will get, the less patient, and their care and compassion will start to drain away.

Now everyone knows this (unless they are totally self-obsessed) and so of course they must prioritise how much of their partner’s time they take up. They simply can’t tell them everything. Not because they have been “wrongly taught to mask their emotions by this world”, but because they don’t want to piss off the person they love or exhaust the person they need. Those are a perfectly valid reasons to suppress your emotions, hide your own pain, and it is a judgement that everyone learns to make for themselves as they grow up.

They must also take care to be authentic. They mustn’t be the “boy that cried wolf”. They must always bear in mind that if they use up all their partner’s care and affection for a pretend crisis, there might be none left when they REALLY need it. And how do you know when you’ve reached the real crisis?

“Is this it? Maybe I won’t say anything for now, because it might get better by itself and then she’ll think I was faking and never believe me again. I will keep my mouth shut and hope that something even worse happens to me.”

There is also the problem (that I am sure everyone experiences) that the primary cause of a person’s heartache and misery also happens to be THE VERY PERSON on whom they would like to depend for emotional support! They ARE the problem!

So there are clearly many complicating factors that constrain people (not just men) from discussing their mental health and emotional life with others. There are basic economic constraints just like for any other precious natural resource.

The challenge can therefore be analysed into a number of possible solutions:

·??????Be perfect yourself and find another perfect person so that neither of you ever have to lean on anyone else emotionally.

That’s probably ridiculous. Everyone’s got problems, haven’t they?

·??????Find someone with roughly the same amount of problems as you, and make sure that amount of problems can be listened to equally without eating too far into your other interests like working, eating and sleeping.

Also sounds like a bit of a fantasy. For starters, how do you know how much baggage a person has when you are still on your honeymoon? Or how many more problems they are going to develop later? BECAUSE of the honeymoon! Let’s face it we all tend to present ourselves in a much better light as we are getting to know someone. It is only later, when we feel safe that all the shit comes out. So it is hard to plan that one.

Problems come and go, and we can certainly have an influence on how few come and how quickly they go.

So perhaps the best thing we can do, given that no matter how carefully you plan your life you will probably end up in middle age with way more problems than anyone else cares to hear, and no one with enough patience to help you. You would need a robot, or an angel, or paid professional, to put their problems completely aside and just listen to yours. (In an extremely affluent society of course this need will be met with a market solution which is what ‘therapy’ is in America.)

So at this point we face a fork in the road. One road leads us to try and find a friend, lover, robot, angel, or paid professional to help us, and take drugs while we’re looking for them. We might say to ourselves

“I have to take this road, because if someone doesn’t help me it will just get worse and worse and it will destroy me!”

Of course this might not be true. You might be crying wolf to yourself. It might be a gross exaggeration that we are encouraged to believe. (Teenagers are notable for crying wolf, and when I was young the world knew better than to take their histrionics at face value. Not now though.)

The other road is different. Going down this road requires real bravery, because it is the road to self-sufficiency and independence. It might not be the road to where we manage to solve all our problems. But it is a road that shows us new ways of living with them, that don’t involve being angry at others for not understanding, or for not listening, or for not caring about us, or for not providing enough funding.

This is where philosophy comes into it. There are some people who have given this a lot of thought in the past and they have many different things to say and a lot of it is hard to understand, but in my understanding they all clarify a couple of very basic things. If we only have so much time and energy to spend on anything, is it better to choose to spend it all being miserable because we never get anyone else to truly understand our misery?

Or is it better to do what we can to fix our own problems ourselves, and make ourselves a presentable and useful and helpful partner or friend to someone else? Or everyone else? Because that is going to require that some things are bottled up.

This is where I start to think of Nietzsche?(or what Jordan Peterson and Alain De Botton say about him) as well as Marcus Aurelius. These are philosophers that had quite a bit to say about how we should deal with pain and failure and frustration in our lives.

They both tended to propose stand-alone solutions, rather than ones that depended on other people to save you. They propose solutions in which governments have zero interest.

Think carefully. Do you want solutions? Do you want better ways to live? Or are your “problems” really just devices to command the attention of people around you, the sort of attention you enjoyed as a child? (or perhaps didn’t get enough of?) All problems are probably a mixture of both. It’s good to be aware though.

With regard to the specific question of whether on the one hand a person is better off giving up on their dreams and forgiving themselves for failing, or on the other hand continuing to feel bad and never being happy about having failed, Nietzsche?in particular thinks the pain of failure is good for us, and tests us so that we can know whether we are heroes or not. That is something you mainly need to do by yourself. Marcus Aurelius also seems to have made life easier to approach by only worrying about the things he knew he could influence. I strongly recommend reading both of these authors, good luck and a patient partner.