Rethinking Depression in Men

Posted on December 4, 2005 in Depression Suicide Violence

You see them all the time, especially on feminist blogs. They are the ones who defend ungodly practices such as job discrimination, stereotypes, and rape. What is wrong with these guys? we ask when they start up. The answer may be the same thing that caused Andrea Yates to drown her four children in the tub: Depression.

When a man gets depressed, he doesn’t “turn all weepy”. His machismo increases as his self-esteem falls:

Some depressed men may be plagued by impotence and loss of sexual interest, but others may become wildly promiscuous. Many complain of depression’s physical symptoms – sleep troubles, fatigue, headaches or stomach distress – without ever discerning their psychological source. Compared to women suffering depression, depressed men are more likely to behave recklessly, drink heavily or take drugs, drive fast or seek out confrontation.

Instead of acting as though they are filled with self-doubt, depressed men may bully and bluster and accuse those around them of failing them. For many men, anger – a masculine emotion that one “manages” rather than succumbs to – is a mask for deep mental anguish.

American men are under numerous pressures: they’re losing the family farm, ending up in dead-end jobs, being mortgaged out of their homes, and pretty much being played for as the sop by the right wing jesters of the media. The sense of loss of control leads to stress and stress leads to physical and emotional fatigue, the central symptom of depression. But men cover it up, limping along to a drummer which doesn’t look to see if the army of the starving class is keeping up. They get laid off and they get angry because they see women keeping their jobs — without realizing that the reason why the women get to keep their jobs is because they are paid less. This consolation doesn’t add up to a lot, however, to a fellow who has gone from making a wage to making nothing.

Life sucks.

Men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide. We’re raised with this combat myth. Die for your country. Die for your family. But when the blade goes to the wrist or the gun to the soft palate, just exactly who are we dying for?

Roving trolls take it out on those they think have robbed them. “Oh,” I can hear them say. “I can take exploitation by my employer, dying in Iraq, losing the farm to a bank which keeps changing the rules on me, and all the stress that gets handed to me by an unjust society, but I’m getting pretty mad about those (fill in the blank).”

Mood disorders don’t make sense. And when we live in an overstressed nation, how the people think and vote doesn’t make sense either. This is a mass psychosis where each person suffers as his neighbor does without sending out even the slightest tendril of shared sorrow to the guy next to him.

There’s no reasoning with a man or a woman in a low state. They believe that they are doomed. They may end up like Richard Henderson* who celebrated Thanksgiving by killing his parents, his grandmother, and his eleven-year old brother. Or they may just take a gun to their heads.

What the depressed male lacks is recognition and proper treatment of his symptoms. Violence is praised if not rewarded by his peers. So he talks in increasing shrill and brutal tones. Preferably in places where he won’t be physically attacked, like feminist blogs. Until he runs himself into a corner with no doors that his conscience and his paranoia can escape through.

A lead capsule through the soft palate and into the brain. That’s the American male’s substitute for Prozac.

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* Henderson’s surviving relatives blame his young wife for his collapse and fall. Brittany Wilde is a domestic violence survivor. When Henderson got out of hand, she sought a restraining order:

In November 2004, Wilde asked a judge to dissolve the restraining order.

“We are gonna work things out,” she said in the court papers. “At the time there was so much going on and that is why things happened the way they did.”

But, as things played out, the restraining order was back in force in December after a fight on their daughter’s birthday.

That Brittany Wilde “pushed her husband over the edge” doesn’t ride the roller coaster for me. His family, however, may be voicing a more realistic concern beneath the drum rolls of accusation: Richard Henderson suffers from depression and no one has been treating him. He also has a history of smoking crack and abusing alcohol, factors that are linked in many studies to increased aggressiveness in both the afflicted and the unafflicted.

Sarasota’s Herald Tribune recites a litany of “breaks” that Henderson received. Only in one case did that include psychiatric care and Henderson, evidentally, listened to the Tom Cruise’s of the world: he did not seek it out. Nor did the court follow up. Two weeks before the shootings, he started a program for domestic violence offenders, a largely behavioral course of treatment. Where were the medications that might have stabilized Henderson?

Florida will solve its Richard Henderson problem as it solves many crimes involving the mentally ill: it will execute him. And, inspired by Henderson’s example, some other young male depressive may act out. This is the price we pay for failing to diagnose and treat the mentally ill.

But that’s show business when it comes to Florida politics.

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Fans of the LA County Jail will gasp at this story:

An inmate who was stomped to death after he cut in front of two gang members in a dinner line at the Men’s Central Jail had mental problems and was incarcerated for a nonviolent offense, authorities said.

Sheriff’s officials said Friday that 35-year-old Chadwick Cochran had been in downtown’s Twin Towers mental health facility last month but was eventually moved into the general population at the Men’s Central Jail, where many violent inmates are housed.

“He was a fish out of water,” Sheriff Lee Baca said. “These inmates were sharks, and he was in the shark tank.”

Yeah, but how did he get there? I want to see the paperwork.