![]() ![]() When you are told that it is not appropriate to talk about your feelings, when you have limits placed on what is okay and what isn’t okay to talk about, when you are expected, or when you expect yourself, to just shut up and deal with it, the consequences can be deadly.Īccording to data from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, for years, four times as many American males killed themselves than their female counterparts. Of course, the stigma against men’s mental health is not funny. I joke because, sometimes, I don’t know what else to do. And, the next time you see a picture of a spider: be more assertive.” “Gabriella,” she might have said, “you don’t have to be afraid-come back and sit with the rest of the class. I have a funny feeling that, had I been a Gabriella instead of a Gabriel, she wouldn’t have said that. Pearlman, who was actually a wonderful teacher whom I loved very much, but those kinds of things, obviously, stay with you. “Oh, Gabriel,” she said disapprovingly, “Don’t be such a sissy.” Now, I don’t mean to pick on Mrs. Logically, I went and hid under a nearby table. I remember being in kindergarten, one story time, and being particularly unsettled by a picture of a large spider in a book. I think it’s possible that this stereotype was much more pervasive years ago, when it was more of a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, boys-don’t-cry, be a man, quit yer bitchin’ kind of society, but sometimes I think that not much has changed. We are judged and pigeon-holed (in similar ways that women are). Men aren’t supposed to have mental health problems. Think of all that the word “man” implies: strength, power, stoicism, assertiveness. Of course, I know now that there is a stigma surrounding mental illness and the stigma is far greater, in my opinion, if you’re a man. What did it matter which door I used to go to the health center? At nineteen, I wasn’t smart enough to fully comprehend the stigma of mental illness, a stigma so powerful that even well-meaning mental health providers perpetuated it, by offering an anonymous entryway you could slink in through, concealed by hedges and secrecy. I walked out with my little appointment card thinking she must have hit her head on the kitchen counter that morning or something. “Oh, nothing - nothing,” she sputtered, “We just offer it so students will feel more, well, comfortable.” “What’s wrong with the door I came in from just now?” The receptionist set me up with an appointment and she said to me, “You know, we do have a back entrance you can use.” I was puzzled. I don’t know what I was hoping to find in that therapist’s office, under the couch cushions or in the tissue box or between the hands of the fifty-minute hour clock, but I knew something had to be there: answers, or at least different questions. I had been messed up for a long time - awash in anxiety and depression - but you need that tipping point, I guess, to motivate you to stand up and do something about it. That’s what happens when you drug people, I guess. I told her that I loved her, and she said it back. I sat, trembling, on my best friend’s bed, talking haltingly to her on the phone as she lay in a hospital bed, hundreds of miles away, nearly completely blitzed from painkillers and sedatives. Mid-way through my freshman year of college, the girl that I had longed to be with for years was nearly killed in a viscous, ice-slicked car wreck that claimed two other young lives. ![]()
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