Excerpt From
"I Don't Want To Talk About It"
From Chapter One:
Men's Hidden Depression
When I stand beside troubled fathers
and sons I am often
flooded with a sense of recognition, All men are sons and,
whether they know it or not, most sons are loyal. To me,
my father presented a confusing jumble of brutality and
pathos. As a boy, I drank into my character a dark, jagged,
emptiness that haunted me for close to thirty years. As
other fathers have done to their sons, my father-through
the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the quality Of
his touch - passed the depression he did not know he had
on to me, just as surely as his father had passed it on to
him -- a chain of pain, linking parent to child across
generations, a toxic legacy.
In hindsight, it is clear to me
that, among other reasons, I
became a therapist so I could cultivate the skills I needed
to heal my own father -- to heal him at least sufficiently to
get him to talk to me. I needed to know about his life to
help understand his brutality and lay my hatred of him to
rest. At first I did this unconsciously, not out of any great
love for him, but out of an instinct to save myself. I wanted
the legacy to stop.
One might think that I would have
brought to my work a
particular sensitivity to issues of depression in men, but at
first I did not. Despite my hard-won personal knowledge,
years passed before I found the courage to invite my
patients to embark upon the same journey I had taken. I
was not prepared, by training or experience, to reach so
deep into a man's inner pain -- to hold and confront him
there.
Faced with men's hidden fragility, I
had been tacitly schooled, like most therapists-indeed, like
most people in our culture -- to protect them.
I had also been taught that depression
was predominantly a woman's disease, that the rate of depression
was somewhere between two to four times higher for women than
it was for men.
When I first began my clinical practice,
I had faith in the simplicity of such figures, but twenty years
of work with men and their families has lead me to believe that
the real story concerning this disorder is far more complex.
There is a terrible collusion in our
society, a cultural cover-up about depression in men.
One of the ironies about men's depression
is that the very
forces that help create it keep us from seeing it.
Men are not supposed to be
vulnerable.
Pain is something we are to rise above.
He who has been brought down by it will
most likely see himself as shameful, and so, too, may
his family and friends, even the mental health profession.
Yet I believe it is this secret pain
that lies at the heart of many of the difficulties in men's lives.
Hidden depression drives several of the problems we think of as
typically male:
physical illness, alcohol and drug abuse,
domestic violence, failures in intimacy, self-sabotage in careers.
We tend not to recognize depression
in men because the disorder itself is seen as unmanly.
Depression carries, to many, a double
stain -- the stigma of mental illness and also the stigma
of "feminine" emotionality.
Those in a relationship with a depressed
man are themselves often faced with a painful dilemma. They can
either confront his condition -- which may further shame him
-- or else collude with him in minimizing it, a course that offers
no hope for relief.
Depression in men -- a condition experienced as both shamefilled
and shameful -- goes largely unacknowledged and unrecognized
both by the men who suffer and by those who surround them.
And yet, the Impact of this hidden
condition is enormous.
Copyright © 1997 by Terry
Real
