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

by Terrence Real

Those subjects who scored high on grandiosity scored low on shame, and vice versa.

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

normal drinkers began with relatively good feelings from the start, while alcoholics started off with an experience of internal pain.

Addictive choices like hustling or stalking are easy to spot because they are socially condemned and potentially life threatening. Other addictive choices, like workaholism for men or obsessive weight reduction for women, are less obvious because they are not only tolerated by our culture but often actively rewarded.

Perhaps the most unadorned form of elevating intoxication is addiction to violence, when the man plays out his position of superiority by hurting and controlling others.

the elevation of self through the medium of control over others is a central theme uniting most forms of abuse—from child molestation to wife battering and even political torture.

When Jimmy lashed out at Shirley, he was, as one abuse expert terms it, “offending from the victim position.”

Flooded with depression and feelings of victimization, Jimmy used rage to physiologically pump up his sense of deflation.

Throughout most cultures and in most ages, this mutation from a state of helplessness to sublimity has been effected by a spiritual awakening. In modern Western mythology, the same transformation is most often effected through the forces of rage and revenge.

In fact, almost every recent Hollywood adventure plays out this theme of revenge in some fashion.

But for the spiritually rich heroes of antiquity, it is their egos, their ordinary selves, that are rent in order to give way to the sublime. In our modern version, the hero’s self is not transmuted by spirit but inflated by violence. This is a dangerous direction for heroism to take.

Without acknowledging it, these rough macho guys depend on union with their women to supplement deficiencies in self-esteem. When their partners “fail them,” they are flooded by depression and shame.

Along with her resentment, Diane’s fear that any sign of affection might arouse Damien had kept her physically distant and unaffectionate for decades.

My father medicated his sense of being shackled and held back with regular doses of arrogance.

alcohol both provides relief from depression and simultaneously creates more of it. What is true for alcoholism is true for all of the

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.

Less fortunate are those covertly depressed men who turn for self-medication not to substances but to people, as in a love addiction, or to actions, particularly violence.

The term personality disorder does not denote a disease at all but rather a variety of serious problems in one’s basic character, an insufficient development of the psyche itself.

But while the capacity to externalize pain protects some men from feeling depressed, it does not stop them from being depressed; it just helps them to disconnect further from their own experience.

Overt depression, prevalent in women, can be viewed as internalized oppression, as the psychological experience of victimization.

Covert depression, prevalent in men, can be viewed as internalized disconnection—the experience of victimization warded off through grandiosity,

And yet, for reasons that I have never seen explained, as a profession we have decided that when the boy hits the magic age of eighteen he is no longer depressed; he has crossed the Rubicon into the land of the personality disordered. This is not reason. This is moral judgment. This is the psychiatric equivalent of transferring a kid from “juvie” court to go stand for his crimes “like a real man.”

To understand depression in men, we must come to terms with the conditions that create it, the ways in which, in the name of masculinity and often with the best of intentions, we betray and deform our sons.

He pushes past other people’s boundaries but then doesn’t accept what they offer.