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

by Terrence Real

His head was thrown back, his eyes shut, his mouth open. It didn’t look like my dad.

It looked like my dad’s body, a thing made of clay,

Men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Pain is something we are to rise above.

men tend to manifest depression differently than women.

affective disorder

etiology

The causation of diseases

Traditional gender socialization in our culture asks both boys and girls to “halve themselves.” 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 is often called. Boys, by contrast, are

discharge distress through action.

women outnumber men in self-mutilation.

Depression in men, unless it is dealt

with, tends to be passed along.

David was “stressed.” At forty-seven, he had begun to feel old. He

black bile,

melancholia.

In the calculus of male pride, stoicism prevails.

But a man brought down by his own unmanageable feel-ings—for many, that is unseemly. This attitude often compounds a depressed man’s condition, so that he gets depressed about being depressed, ashamed about feeling ashamed.

many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress,

The results of most of them show a tendency for mental health professionals to overdiagnose women’s depression and underdiagnose the disorder in men.

It seems that they are punishing clients of both sexes with a more severe diagnosis for crossing gender lines. If it is unmanly to be depressed and unwomanly to drink, then a depressed man must be really disturbed, just

like an alcoholic woman.

he managed to hide it even from himself.

overt depression

I want to learn more about overt depresskon

It is hidden from those around him, and it is largely hidden from his own conscious awareness.

Here is thnswer to more information about overt depression

drives many of his actions.

numbs his discontent wit...