Homecoming: An Evolutionary Strategy for Therapeutic Despair and Stopping Suicide
Half 1
Despair and suicide have been my companions way back to I can bear in mind. I used to be 5 years previous when my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping capsules. Although he didn’t die our lives have been by no means the identical. I grew up questioning what occurred to my father, when it might occur to me, and what I may do to forestall it from taking place to different households.
In an article, “Being Bipolar: Living and Loving in a World of Fire and Ice,” I described my very own psychological well being challenges and therapeutic journey. In my ebook, The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Despair and Aggression, I shared my analysis and medical expertise that satisfied me that women and men are totally different in methods they cope with despair and aggression of their lives and in different methods as nicely.
Despair and suicide will not be simply issues for males, however there’s something about being male that will increase our threat of dying by suicide. Based on latest statistics from the Nationwide Institute of Mental Health, the suicide charge amongst males is, on common, 4 occasions greater (22.8 per 100,000) than amongst females (5.7 per 100,000) and at all ages the speed is greater amongst males than females:
Even throughout our youth the place suicide charges are comparatively low, males are nonetheless extra more likely to die by suicide than are females. It is usually clear to me as my spouse and I transfer into our 80s, we face many challenges as we age, however it’s older males who extra typically finish their lives by suicide with charges 8 to 17 occasions greater than for females.
In my ebook, My Distant Dad: Therapeutic the Household Father Wound, I describe my father’s slide into despair and the despair that elevated when he couldn’t discover work. As a author, he wrote common entries in his journals. I nonetheless really feel the ache as I re-read them and really feel his rising disgrace when he couldn’t assist his household:
July third:
“Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college decree with a love for books, a love for people, good, solid knowledge. No guidance was given to me. I slogged and slobbered and blundered through two-thirds of my life.”
July twenty fourth:
“Edie dear, Johnny dear, I love you so much, but how do I get the bread to support you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It lies sterile for months and then it gnaws until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells in me like a large goiter blacking out room for hopes, dreams, joy, and life itself.”
August eighth:
“Sunday morning, my humanness has fled, my sense of comedy has gone down the drain. I’m tired, hopelessly tired, surrounded by an immense brick wall, a blood-spattered brick world, splattered with my blood, with the blood of my head where I senselessly banged to find an opening, to find one loose brick, so I could feel the cool breeze and could stick out my hand and pluck a handful of wheat, but this brick wall is impregnable, not an ounce of mortar loosens, not a brick gives.”
September eighth:
“Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.”
October twenty fourth:
“Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.”
November twelfth:
“A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”
4 days later, he took an overdose of sleeping capsules and spent seven years in a psychological hospital receiving “treatment” till the day he escaped. The ebook has a cheerful ending, nevertheless it took a very long time to get there.
I share what I’ve realized through the years in an on-line course, “Healing the Family Father Wound.” I not too long ago learn a chapter within the ebook, The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health edited by J.A. Barry, et al., by Martin Seager, titled “From Stereotypes to Archetypes: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Help-Seeking and Suicide,” that provides some necessary items to the puzzle and added to my understanding of male despair and suicide and the way we are able to extra successfully assist males and their households.
An Evolutionary Understanding of Male Psychology
“In our current age it is unfashionable to think of human gender as connected with our biology and evolution,”
says Dr. Seager.
“Gender is currently thought of primarily as a social construct, a theory that carries assumptions that gender can be fluid, molded by education or even chosen as a part of a lifestyle. Gender is increasingly seen as a collection of disposable social stereotypes, separate from and unrelated to biological sex.”
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“This hypothesis is bad science and even worse philosophy…When held up against the anthropological and cross-cultural evidence, a social constructionist theory of gender cannot explain clearly observable and universal patterns of male and female behavior.”
I agree with Dr. Seager and have lengthy held that we can not perceive or assist males, or ladies, with out recognizing our organic roots within the animal kingdom. In my ebook, 12 Guidelines For Good Males, Rule #4 is “Embrace Your Billion Year History of Maleness.” I introduce the chapter with a quote from cultural historian Thomas Berry.
“The natural world is the largest sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human.”
I additionally say within the ebook that every one people are additionally mammals and we can not perceive males with out recognizing that reality. Dr. Seager agrees.
“Human beings are evolved mammals and they have never stopped being so,”
says Seager.
“Whatever social, cultural and political structures are placed upon us as humans, these cannot erase our mammalian heritage and indeed are constructed upon and shaped by that heritage, though not determined or defined by it.”
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“Globally, across all human tribes or societies and throughout all known history and pre-history, allowing for inevitable variation across a spectrum, there are universal patterns of male and female behavior in the human species.”
Primarily based on probably the most huge research of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing greater than 10,000 individuals of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Buss discovered that there are two human natures, one male and one feminine. In his ebook, The Evolution of Want: Methods of Human Mating, Dr. David Buss explains the evolutionary roots of what women and men need and explains why their wishes differ so radically.
“Within human beings perhaps the most obvious universal patterns of sexual differences are: Female: (1) Beauty, attraction and glamour (Including body adornment) and (2) Bearing and nurturance of new-born infants and young children. Male: (1) Physical protection (strength) and (2) Risk-taking,”
says Dr. Seager.
Dr. Seager goes on to say,
“In all human cultures throughout history and prehistory there is consistent and incontestable evidence of males taking high levels of risk to protect and provide for their family, tribe, and community or nation either collectively as bands of hunters and warriors or as individuals.”
Some view male risk-taking as foolhardy, immature, self-destructive, and dangerous to ladies and youngsters in addition to males themselves. However each Dr. Seager and I acknowledge that defending ladies and youngsters and risk-taking habits are archetypal, instinctual, optimistic, and evolutionarily necessary for survival methods.
Within the second a part of this sequence, we are going to proceed our exploration of the way we are able to enhance our understanding of male despair and suicide and the way we may be simpler in serving to males and their households.
You’ll be able to study extra in regards to the work of Martin Seager on the Centre For Male Psychology.
We’d like extra applications for males which might be evolutionary-archetypally knowledgeable. You’ll be able to study extra at MenAlive.com and MoonshotForMankind.org. If you happen to like articles like these, I invite you to change into a subscriber.
