What can we do about the high male suicide rate?

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Fnord
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07 Feb 2016, 5:25 pm

Trogluddite wrote:

Fnord, for someone who hates sweeping generalisations, you are awfully fond of using them yourself.

Willl you please stop implying that you speak for all men. It is very kind of you to offer to martyr yourself for me, but that's not the kind of help I came here looking for thankyou very much. [sarcasm].

We know what your opinion on the subject is - you made it perfectly clear the first time. This thread is not a competition, they won't be handing out prizes to the "winner" at the end of the thread. Nobody was trying to slight you at any point - you are just cherry picking arguments which are tangental to the subjest at hand so that you can rant about your favourite pet conspiracy theory.

Please - Shhhh, this is a serious and emotive subject that we're talking about. Stop trying to score points off people - nobody but you is keeping count.

- False accusations.
- Telling me to shut up.
- Quoted for posterity.
- Reported.

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100000fireflies
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07 Feb 2016, 5:33 pm

Fnord wrote:

Deltaville wrote:

Fnord wrote:

100000fireflies wrote:

Hopper wrote:

Fnord, I think you're engaging in projection here. However hurtful and upsetting your experience, it is unreasonable and unfair to assert such things were the case with others.

Perhaps. I however took some offense to the statement that men don't understand their feelings. I sure as hll would have if it had been something similar like women are too emotional and don't even know what they're feeling. As such, i might reply with a bit more of an edge than i otherwise would.

Thank you. The statement was both sexist and offensive, and I have clicked the "Report" button on it. Your analogy was spot on, too. If a man says that women can't control their emotions, he gets labeled as a sexist troll, and will likely receive a nasty-gram from the mods. If a woman says that men don't understand their emotions, she gets all kinds of support from the other members, and the mods ignore it. We still have a long way to in the equal treatment of the sexes.

I am not sure what is offensive in the said comment.

The statement that "men don't understand their emotions" directly states that men have no understanding of their own feelings, and indirectly implies that all men are simply not smart enough to do so. It offended me, and because it was a negative sweeping generalization of men made by a woman, it is thus a sexist and misandrous claim.

The original statement is a prime example of why men don't seek help for dealing with their emotions - disparaging claims that they don't really understand what is going on.

Your failure to see the offensiveness of the statement only adds to it.

That was how i read it too. Both the primary statement and underlying.
Having read other of Y's posts, i tried to take it with salt that maybe that wasn't what was meant..just what i reacted to. But for me, it read no other way and thus hit a nerve.

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0_equals_true
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07 Feb 2016, 5:40 pm

I don't think Yigeren meant to cause offense. I can understand why offense was made, however can we take it as one experience?

Perhaps there is a misconception between perception of emotions and expression of emotions. The reality is it is very difficult to research on perception anyway.

Lets not get into the whole PC/offense mode of thinking.

All input is welcome.

Amity
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07 Feb 2016, 5:46 pm

Yigeren wrote:

Fnord wrote:

Yigeren wrote:

... Males also seem to not be as aware of their feelings as women are. They may know that they feel bad, but not be able to identify the cause...

... says the woman, citing opinions from her own perspective.

We men are aware of our feelings. We also know that women tend to tell us that we don't know what real feelings feel like. They also belittle us for our feelings or dismiss our feelings entirely. Our moms train us early to not cry when we're hurt or sad. Our dads tell us that real men don't cry at all (yet we sometimes catch them crying when they think that no one is around).

Yes, we are aware of our feelings. We also know that most people really don't give a damn about what we feel, as long as we act happy and/or romantic.

Let us express all of our feelings without hearing sexist comments like "Males are not as aware of their feelings as women are", and maybe fewer of us will contemplate suicide as a last resort.

That's not true. Maybe for the women you know. The men I know do not understand nor communicate their feelings. I know this, because that's what I've been told, by the men I'm talking about.

I actually would prefer that men talk about their feelings, but it's like pulling teeth. When I ask questions, the response I get is "I don't know." It takes forever to even get any kind of answer.

All women aren't evil harpies determined to use men for their money and then keep them whipped for the rest of their lives. I don't ever belittle men's feelings. Stop using your own personal negative experiences to make judgements against all women.

Yigeren is referring to her personal experiences, speculating yes, but not making sweeping generalisations.

100000fireflies
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07 Feb 2016, 5:49 pm

0_equals_true wrote:

I'm not sure there is a relationship between Alexithymia and suicidal thoughts. Isn't that kind of depression an extreme form of sadness? Or beyond sadness?

I have heard the catatonic state described with lack of emotion. However I've talked to people who are suicidal, I'm not sure it is the case they are not aware of their emotions. If anything they are too aware of their emotions.

The problem is putting their thoughts into perspective. From my second hand experience it is like a microcosm. It is hard to reach them.

Not as a male, but as someone who is amazingly still here, yes. At those points, numbness..not the deep, hollow pain of empty, but feeling detached, would be a blessing over the entrenching, eternal pain. For some, maybe not, but for me, unquestionably. It's why i fully understand people drinking, etc into oblivion to try to escape the pit and step up into irrelevance.

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Yigeren
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07 Feb 2016, 5:54 pm

It didn't have anything to do with whether or not men are clever enough to understand their emotions. It's my personal experiences with men, and what they've told me about how they deal with, understand, and communicate emotions.

It's probably partially cultural conditioning and partly biology. I think men often feel they shouldn't act vulnerable or worry about their emotions because "real men are tough and just deal with things". I don't agree with this idea, but nevertheless it's a part of many cultures, and as a result many men repress or ignore their emotions, perhaps from a young age. Without practice, it's likely that a person will not be able to express or identify his or her emotions.

When I was young, I did not really understand on a conscious level, my emotions or the reasons for the way I behaved. I didn't become emotionally self-aware until I developed an interest in psychology and become extremely introspective. I believe this is partly a result of my ASD, but I think it's possible that men may have these same issues without practice.

I'm not sure how it's my fault that the men I know feel and act in this way. It's not like I made it up in order to be sexist towards men. I simply related what I know based upon what men have told me. Perhaps the culture here is too macho?

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07 Feb 2016, 6:23 pm

So, I just asked a man about his opinion of men's understanding of and communication of feelings:

Q: Do men talk about their feelings, even if only when around other men?

A: Only if it's absolutely necessary.

Q: Why don't men talk about their feelings?

A: It's a sign of weakness.

Q: Where does this idea come from?

A: It becomes apparent as a boy is growing up.

Q: Do men spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings?

A: No.

Q: Do men fully understand their feelings and behaviors?

A: No.

So there is an opinion of a cisgendered man, with plenty of experience in interacting with other cisgendered men.

As I said, I didn't make this stuff up.

Fnord
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07 Feb 2016, 6:55 pm

Yigeren wrote:

So, I just asked a man about his opinion of men's understanding of and communication of feelings:

Q: Do men talk about their feelings, even if only when around other men?
A: Only if it's absolutely necessary.

Q: Why don't men talk about their feelings?
A: It's a sign of weakness.

Q: Where does this idea come from?
A: It becomes apparent as a boy is growing up.

Q: Do men spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings?
A: No.

Q: Do men fully understand their feelings and behaviors?
A: No.

So there is an opinion of a cisgendered man, with plenty of experience in interacting with other cisgendered men.

As I said, I didn't make this stuff up.

ONE cis-gendered man.

To be fair, you could present this as a general survey, and report your findings after a hundred men have responded. For example, I looked in the mirror, and asked another cis-gendered man the same questions. These were his responses:

Q: Do men talk about their feelings, even if only when around other men?
A: Yes, but usually by representing themselves as "a friend" or "this guy I know".

Q: Why don't men talk about their feelings?
A: It's not only a sign of weakness, but a social weakness that can be exploited by both male and female bullies. Also, almost no one seems to care about men's feelings unless they are paid to do so - the only exceptions being spouses and girlfriends. Even then, a man has to be careful of what he says, so as not to cause an argument.

Q: Where does this idea come from?
A: Parents who tell boys to stop whining and fight their own battles. Media images of "real" men as being capable of doing anything without feeling anything other than pride in a job well done. People who tell boys and men that their feelings are inappropriate, or that their reports of their feelings are exaggerated. Misandrous strangers who declare that men are incapable of understanding their own feelings, as if all men were too stupid to know what's going on inside their own minds and bodies. Wives and girlfriends who read too much between the lines and assume that the man is blaming them.

Q: Do men spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings?
A: I know that I do. The preponderance of male suicides may indicated that other men do too. I ponder their origins, their meanings, their effects on my health and behavior, and how they feel inside.

Q: Do men fully understand their feelings and behaviors?
A: I know that I do. The preponderance of male suicides may indicated that other men do too. I understand what causes them, why they exist, how they affect my health and general behavior, and how they make me feel inside.

There, see? Ask two men, and get two sets of answers.

Ask another 98 men, and see what other answers you may get.

Last edited by Fnord on 07 Feb 2016, 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

0_equals_true
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07 Feb 2016, 6:58 pm

Yigeren that in an interesting survey.

I tend to take with a pinch of salt what people say about their behavior though, from my experience looking at social behaviour. I'd compare questionnaires with other types of evidence, such as some kind of test that would demonstrate recognition of their or others emotions.

Who actually fully understands their behaviour or feeling anyway? That is the cutting edge of knowledge. What does "fully understanding feelings" actually mean?

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 07 Feb 2016, 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hopper
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07 Feb 2016, 6:59 pm

0_equals_true wrote:

I remember a radio documentary about depression, and one woman who'd lost her daughter to suicide thought her condition was better summed up with 'emotional distress'. I found this term better fit my own experience of feeling suicidal. It is an intense agitation, made known to me by a feeling of just wanting to walk and walk, of having to keep moving, of wanting to tear myself apart. It is, I imagine, the taste of gun oil in one's mouth, the smell of charred remains. It tends to sneak up on me, and doesn't last very long.

Day-to-day I tend to a soft, almost wistful melancholy. It is not a problem for me, though it took me quite a while to realise this.

Some words from Infinite Jest:

David Foster Wallace wrote:

...there’s more than one kind of so-called ‘depression.’ One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia [Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.] or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . . . well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.

...

...numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this depression clinical depression or involuntary depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

---

Fuller text here:

http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2011/05/1 ... e-gompert/

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btbnnyr
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07 Feb 2016, 7:04 pm

I guess the males I know talk about their feelings more than is common, based on what others are saying here.
Pretty much all males I know and interact with frequently have talked about their feelings in my hearing or directly with me.

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Yigeren
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07 Feb 2016, 7:06 pm

The point is, I have asked other men. Perhaps the men in my area have different cultural attitudes.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do when men tell me how men feel and act. Should I say "No, you liar! Men don't feel that way !" Or should I take their word for it, since they actually are men, and I'm not?

Your attacking me based upon what other men have told me is unfair. I'm not a mind-reader. I can't mentally scan all the brains of the men I come into contact with to find out how they feel. I can only assume that they are telling the truth.

How do you know that you aren't in the minority? What if most men feel the way that the men I have described do? How do you know how most other men feel? Are you an expert on how men around the world feel as a whole?

Fnord
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07 Feb 2016, 7:10 pm

David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, short stories and essays, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. He died in 2008 at the age of 46.

In the early 1990s, Wallace became obsessed with the memoirist Mary Karr. Despite her statements that she was not interested, Wallace got her name tattooed on his body and even contemplated killing her husband. The two later had a tumultuous relationship during which, Karr reported, Wallace once threw a coffee table at her and attempted to push her out of a car.

Wallace struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression, suicide attempts, institutionalization, and at times inappropriate sexual behavior. Wallace is reported to have slept with some of his female students while teaching at university and sometimes exhibited stalking-like obsessive behavior when enamored of a woman.

:roll:

0_equals_true
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07 Feb 2016, 7:11 pm

Personal experiences are what they are. On their own they are anecdotal. However it is cool to discuss them. I have given such experiences too.

Anecdotes can form the bases of a hypothesis, which would need to be tested.

100000fireflies
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07 Feb 2016, 7:24 pm

0_equals_true wrote:

I think that putting aside this or that post (i agree, though perhaps poorly worded, my last post was trying to say that i didn't think it was meant to), a point was raised..

Actually, a few. One is about stereotypes and views we may hold that are unintentionally continuing sexism(of Any sex) racism (of Any race), etc. That though, and even fnord's comment that a man gets hit by the mods whereas the reverse statement isn't, is a discussion of merit. However, it is also tangential and this topic has enough of its own arms as-is. So, i agree that would be a good, different thread.

Another does however relate to sexism..and those views. Your topic is Male suicide, not human. And as such, whether called "pc" or not (pc is another topic), thoughts and stereotypes related to and from men are relevant.

On that note, i think that something that did come out of it is.. Maybe there is a stereotype or concept that men can't/don't understand their feelings..that is held by more than a minority.
I never thought that, so i don't know. But a lot of things i never thought, seem 'normal' to others, so i'm not a good base.
Point being, if that is a concept, i think it (minus who posted what) is valuable to explore as well. After all, if it exists on a greater level than one post, it can be a damaging concept which may well contribute to how men are able to deal with emotions (e.g. resources, the feeling of not wanting to share as you may be belittled, feeling like you're odd if you do feel these things since supposedly others don't, etc).

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100000fireflies
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07 Feb 2016, 7:35 pm

Fnord wrote:

Q: Where does this idea come from?
A: Parents who tell boys to stop whining and fight their own battles. Media images of "real" men as being capable of doing anything without feeling anything other than pride in a job well done. People who tell boys and men that their feelings are inappropriate, or that their reports of their feelings are exaggerated.
...

That one i think is a problem and instigator for both men and women..and is indeed a problem. A culture or environment that belittles, devalues, or completely invalidates one's feelings is toxic. Another may not understand how or why i feel x about y, but that does Not mean i am wrong, nor that i don't feel it.
It is yet more toxic when done by power positions such as parents, teachers, and counselors.

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