Comment by tossandthrow

Not the commenter, and I 'm not a fan of how normal it has become to do one's dirty laundry in public. But I find it lamentable that the most popular takeaway from the internet's mainstreaming of feminist thought is that men’s issues are necessarily in competition with women's issues for representation.

It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".

There was certainly quite a bit of deep talk about "integrity" and "character" in our grandfathers' generation, that was ultimately relating to issues we would now comprise under so-called 'mental health'. It's not clear to me that this medicalized framing ("...health") is necessarily and consistently better than a more traditional one focused on developing a well-adjusted character.

This is a brilliant comment.

I'd like to elaborate on something you touch on briefly:

> I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.

> that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.

I think there's an important line to walk here. I think it's important everyone (men and women) are able to talk about their feelings and experiences with their friends - but I don't think the goal needs to be "helping work it out". Just sharing and listening can be liberating, can help ease the road to talking to a professional, and can help others see that others struggle too.

There is a tendency in conversations of any sort to be always searching for a "solution" or an "answer", instead of just listening.

(There's a lot of nuance here in choosing when to share, etc, but I just wanted to talk a bit about it)

"few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident"

Is that really a thing?

I mean sure there might people doing this, but it is obvious that telling someone they have too little self esteem, that this is a personal and can very well be perceived as an attack (especially by someone with low self esteem).

(Also I think the distinction is a bit weird in general. Isn't confidence sexy in women, too?)

I think the reason why mental health is more public these days is because it wasn't talked about and addressed.

To extend you physical injury analogy: yes, people get physically injured. People break legs, and because of the focus and progress on physical injuries, they wear a cast for a few weeks, and then - for all practical intents and purposes - the injury never happened.

Because the same attention wasn't applied to mental health, I think people realised they were surrounded by the equivalent of people dragging themselves around on the ground because of a broken leg a decade ago that never got fixed. Why would anyone do that? Either because they don't know about the treatment, or because they live in an environment where the idea of getting treatment is seen as a bad or weak or shameful thing.

> Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?

Just like we expect to walk down the street and see the occasional person with a plaster or bandage to handle a physical injury, if you accept we all have mental injuries, why do you expect to see them handled any more privately than physical ones?

The word trauma is weighty but has a very broad application. I think most people learn about it in the context of e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder (formerly known as battle fatigue, formerly known as shellshock) and associate it with veterans coming back from the war, but it basically applies to anything that have a lasting effect on people. Could be something like parents being emotionally unavailable, childhood bullying, etc.

No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.

I'd say that significant mental injury is _far_ more likely than physical.

Your view is representing a traditionally more masculine point of view.

A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma.

What we want as a society is a democratic process, and it is heavily up for negotiation these years. It is completely fine.

Personally, my core belief is that whatever we ultimately decide on, it counts for all equivalent regardless of their gender.

If obsessing about such injuries was sufficient to heal them, they would all be long solved.

In all fairness, the internet is for many people a near 100% part of their life.

Especially for people working remotely without a family.

It definitely does feel like every American I know "has a therapist", sometimes.

At work, like all the time? Empowerment, values, growth mindset, psychological safety, mindfulness, emotional intelligence...

Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves.

There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic.

There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc.

There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc.

It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.

There is not an inherent ideology to psychology, and I'm not sure what you mean by statements such as "the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole" (not even judging; I actually don't know what you mean).

It’s still definitely a big deal. Note that the CIA and the NSA routinely declare ex-employees that whistleblow or leak as “mentally ill.”

It depends on the company. I worked for fairly “stolid” companies, for most of my career, and I suspect that they would treat mentally-ill people badly.

Mental illness is something that, unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with. I have severe mental illness in my family (I deal with it every day), and I spend a significant part of my life, interacting with folks at various stages of recovery from it.

I have been seeing therapists for much of my life. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with autism, but was never told, so I spent decades, trying to “fix” myself, before finding out. Once I found out that I was “on the spectrum,” I realized that it can’t be “fixed”; only mitigated, and things started improving quickly, at that point.

That said, I think “mentally-ill” means “diagnosed and professionally-treated,” to most folks. It’s my opinion, that there’s a lot of undiagnosed/untreated mental illness out there. Just looking at the threads of interaction, on any Internet community, makes that clear. One “tell,” that I have encountered, is when someone has extremely strong opinions on psychiatry. It’s not something most folks even think about, so it’s unusual, when it’s a big deal to someone.

Mental illness also tends to get worse, as we get older, if untreated. An “eccentric” young man, may become an old hermit, flying around, keeping his piss in canopic jars.

Much of what we call “mental illness,” is actually self-developed coping mechanisms, in response to trauma, or brain-chemistry imbalance. That’s why getting medication doesn’t just “fix” us. We need to seek help in defusing the habits and rituals that were developed to help deal with the problem.

Yeah, I have a number of coworkers that have shared with me that they are on psychiatric medications, and have discussed mental health with. It's becoming normalized, and that's a good thing.

I think in many places there's now enough of critical mass where people are understanding enough and call out anyone who uses that information negatively towards the person.

> because I don't know that any of them did

This is telling in itself.

Is vulnerable about letting people know how you feel or your weaknesses?

What about letting people know how you feel and your weaknesses while not caring if someone judges you for it? Is that being vulnerable or not?

> The alternative is being a fortress - with all the relationship problems that entails.

I’m reminded of the concept of siege mentality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_mentality

> In sociology, siege mentality is a shared feeling of victimization and defensiveness—a term derived from the actual experience of military defences of real sieges. It is a collective state of mind in which a group of people believe themselves constantly attacked, oppressed, or isolated in the face of the negative intentions of the rest of the world. Although a group phenomenon, the term describes both the emotions and thoughts of the group as a whole, and as individuals. The result is a state of being overly fearful of surrounding peoples, and an intractably defensive attitude.

> Among the consequences of a siege mentality are black and white thinking, social conformity, and lack of trust, but also a preparedness for the worst and a strong sense of social cohesion.

If you are under attack, vulnerability is bad.

Historic ‘stoic male’ personas existed for a reason. Because in many situations, it works. Despite the complaining.

And being less ‘emotionally connected’ is valuable when people use that connection to exploit or hurt you. A very common experience for many men.

That people (especially women) then complain you won’t open up to them is a riot in those situations because it’s like someone complaining you keep putting on your bullet proof vest - while they keep shooting at you.

Historic male mental health issues also resulted. But notably, folks depending on the stoic persona for their own wellbeing would typically throw you under the bus for those issues too.

“How dare you get mad! You’re a dangerous threat!” says the person constantly harassing the person, or the boss putting you in worse and worse work conditions while pretending they are doing you a favor, etc.

They do that, of course, because mad people actually fight back. But if you need the job or are dependent on the relationship…

As many men have experienced, the only way to ‘win’ is shut off caring about what people say on that front - among other emotions.

I guess the question is -> why do we need that guard in the first place?

Is this about other people being immature or looking to abuse us? Is this something that generally goes beyond school?

> I think it's sad that performative emotions & vulnerability seem to be a popular thing to have to signal for acceptance.

You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not and performative anything is not required for acceptance, but people are not accepting of others who deal with their social interaction in these terms and your very language betrays where you stand. These imaginary requirements for affection are not what's sad here.