Pain has two voices. One is a howl of anguish. The other is a stifled cry.
One is given freely, openly, in urgency. The other is barely given at all. It is kept and caged, left to rattle the bars until it lies down and is silent.
In mental health, especially men’s mental health, we often give our pain the second voice.
The importance of talking about mental health is, thankfully, now better understood. Great strides have been made in the last few years to put the topic on the table, though our health service is still far behind where it needs to be in terms of providing practical resources and treatment.
Raising awareness is always a step forward, but until basic funding, staffing and infrastructure issues are solved, mental health will not achieve true parity of esteem, and preventable deaths will continue.
That will come. It has to. For now, we have one tool available to us all, if we choose to use it.
Time to talk
Talking about mental health helps break the stigma around it, normalising what is for many people already a very normal part of their life. It sends a signal to people who are struggling that they can ask for help, that what they’re going through is not unique to them. It promotes a wider understanding of what mental health actually is, that issues like stress, anger and loneliness are part of the same landscape and deserve attention.
Above all, talking can release the stop valve. If a container is pressurised, shaken and shaken, filled to the brim until the joints buckle, it takes only one hard knock for those joints to burst, and the container explodes. Occasional venting brings the pressure down and enables some stability.
It doesn’t fix the problem, but helps prevent it from swelling beyond the point of control. When you’re brought up to repress uncomfortable emotions, though, the pressure seems preferable, and the explosion inevitable.
And after the inevitable, there are pieces to be picked up. Pieces of us, pieces of others. The hurt is not isolated. The damage is collateral.
Men that are brought up without emotional intelligence, with which we understand what feelings are for and how to deal with them, are left with the few methods of expression that they’re allowed to possess. Feelings are transmutable. What should be embraced as failure is twisted into shame. What should be expressed as fear is instead hidden, left to fester, and turns to anger.
It is our husbands and wives, our boyfriends and girlfriends, our close friends and colleagues who bear the weight of our misspent emotion.
To lash out, you need someone to lash out at. To wall yourself off, you need someone to wall yourself off from. It’s a price they shouldn’t have to pay.
When we shut off our hardest feelings from those closest to us, we are not, as we may think, shielding them from our darknesses. We are denying them our true selves. If they love us, they love all of us, weaknesses and frailties and all, and they deserve the opportunity to see them.
As some of us know, the ones with the deepest darknesses are often the ones who hide them the best. In the saddest circumstances, we learn this too late, and all we can say is, “I had no idea. I wish I had known.”
The trash compactor
The male engine for processing emotions is, too often, a trash compactor. We take these things that we cannot face, feed them to the machine and go back upstairs.
Under the guise of masculinity, this dangerous method of coping is programmed into us all, and even those who recognise it within themselves still have to wrestle with its consequences.
Feelings are not trash, and they are not to be crushed into cubes and dropped to the bottom of the sea. They pile up, breaking the surface in ugly manifestations that monster passing ships and pollute the waters around them. And then they topple, and come crashing down around us.
Speak, for the sake of yourself and those that love you. Don’t crumple up your hurts into waste paper. It is a hard thing, to battle centuries of expectation, but the first way for men to help themselves is for men to be themselves. Truly themselves.
Be open, be vulnerable, for the sake of yourself and those that love you.
- Anyone can contact Samaritans free any time from any phone on 116 123. This number won’t show up on your phone bill. Or you can email jo@samaritans.orgor visit www.samaritans.org to find details of your nearest branch.
- On March 23 CALM, Campaign Against Living Miserably launched a petition calling for ministerial responsibility of suicide prevention and bereavement support. Sign the petition here: http://bit.ly/SuicidePetition2018
