I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

by Terrence Real

Girls are allowed to maintain emotional expressiveness

and cultivate connection.

But they are systematically discouraged from fully developing and exercising their public, assertive selves—their “voice,” as it...

encouraged to develop their public, assertive selves, but they are systematically pushed away from the full exercise of emotional expressiveness and the skills ...

Current research makes it clear that a vulnerability to depression is most probably an inherited biological condition.

It is the collision of inherited vulnerability with psychological injury that produces depression.

They blame themselves and draw distress into themselves. Boys, and later men, tend to externalize pain; they are more likely to feel victimized by others and to discharge distress through action. Hospitalized

Too often, the wounded boy grows up to become a wounding man, inflicting upon those closest to him the very distress he refuses to acknowledge within himself.

“Masked depression is one of the most prevalent disorders in modern American society, yet it is perhaps the most neglected category in psychiatric literature.”

The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.

Society bids many of us to forget about inherent worth and, instead, to supplement the deficiency with external props such as wealth, beauty, status. The greater the scarcity in true self-esteem, the greater the need for supplementation.

Thomas had trouble bearing real intimacy with others because he could not afford to be emotionally intimate with himself. Liriope, the mother of Narcissus, once asked a sage if her son would enjoy a long

The covertly depressed man, in contrast, relies on such external stimulants to rectify an inner baseline

Defensive compensations for underlying depression can never move one directly from shame to healthy self-esteem, because such a shift requires confrontation with, rather than avoidance of, one’s own feelings. The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault

The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite

In psychoanalysis this experience is called “oceanic bliss.”

Only after the shame cycle has stopped, after the addictive pattern itself has been broken, and after the person has moved into “sobriety” can the pain of covert depression be addressed.

Men do not have readily at hand the same level of insight into their emotional lives as women, because our culture works hard to dislocate them from those aspects of themselves.

the experience of victimization warded off through grandiosity, perhaps through victimizing. Morally, one might place an unequal judgment

Men make up close to 93 percent of the prison

Drug dependency in women runs at 5.9 percent of the total population, while in men it is 9.2 percent.

Childhood injury in boys creates both the wounds and the defenses against the wounds that are the foundation for adult depression.

He called this mix Depression Spectrum Disease.

another name for covert depression.

he and his colleagues found evidence of a genetic link between depression and alcoholism, with the former linked to women, the later to men.

The same can be said for William Styron, who was flooded with an utterly deliberating depression once he stopped drinking.

childhood trauma does not always directly correlate

Active trauma is usually a boundary violation of some kind, a clearly toxic interaction. Passive trauma, on the other hand, is a form of physical or emotional neglect.

Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance.

Studies indicate that from the moment of birth, boys are spoken to less

girls, comforted less, nurtured less. Passive trauma in boys is rarely extreme; it is however, pervasive.

More than the childhood diseases we spend millions combating, more than accident or natural disaster, violence is the number one killer of boys and young men.