DEPRESSION AND MASCULINITY CHANGING NARRATIVES ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH.
Non-conformity. Family. Stigma.
There’s an old Indian story of a woman who raises a son born with a facial deformity. The boy was constantly bullied, the mother seemed to possess neither the vocabulary or the voice to help the situation and comfort his son. All she does as counter corrective is to read him stories of great men from history before bed. Years pass by, on his mother’s deathbed, the boy — now a healthy, full-grown adult — asks why she never stood up for him while he was suffering. She said, ‘I had limited time and limited choices; I could either focus on looking after you; getting food on your table and nourishing your mind, or fighting the world to accept you as you are. I chose to nurse your imagination about your strengths than fill it with the narratives of the powers of people who didn’t understand our lives and us. I fought to accept our lives and ourselves, and that was a real struggle too.’
Struggles are real for us and for some they are as unique as our personalities and backgrounds. However, the common human thread that runs through them all might be more similar than we think, and hold the keys to our resilience.
From US National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention to American Psychological Association to Trevor Project to Stonewall UK, there is an evidence-based consensus of the increased likelihood of LGBTQ individuals committing suicide and having suicidal thoughts and behaviours (STBs) compared to the general population. Some reports in the Journal of Homosexuality (Hass et al., 2011) suggest that we are twice as likely to commit suicide compared to our heterosexual counterparts. This is just one of a multitude of studies that point to the unique mental health challenges faced by sexually marginalised communities. With rates being so high, we arguably lost more queer and questioning souls to suicide than to HIV/AIDS related health complications.
Let me give you a laundry list of our unique troubles. From external factors like minority stressors, poor access to public health, gender nonconformity, unsupportive families, lack of social support, childhood abuse, drug abuse, workplace homophobia, transphobia within and outside the community, misogyny, unrealistic body standards and what not. The list is long, but only as formidable as our willingness to interpret it to be so.
The two major problematic ways of thinking about depression are; people are too fragile to handle real and uncomfortable conversations about emotional health, and second; the only way to correct the situation is to remove the triggers. While both goals are nobly admirable and definitely come from a really good place within us, nothing is contextual. I’m as big an advocate of safe spaces as the next rational person. I believe in reasonably standing up for all our rights and against all the horrible people in politics and public spaces is essential. But it’s not enough for our mental health. It’s part of the puzzle of living fulfilled lives, but it hardly completes the picture.
Our personal and political discourse is disproportionately focused on the “menacing monsters,” outside of us in the form of other people, policies and prose. This calms us, makes us feel solidarity and validation. You can think of it as food, actually — feel good junk food, in fact. High in calories but lacking in any nutritional value. When the conference is over and people have all gone to their respective homes, we are left do deal with veggies of our existence on our own, without so much as a dip to make it tastier. That’s when we find we have to deal with the bloated size of the monster that our earlier narrative diet created, with very few actual skills to deal with our dysfunctional thoughts, feelings and behaviors. In a nutshell, psychologically speaking, we have made the ‘monster’ bigger than our strengths to deal with it.
Whether you have problems or privileges, you have experienced sadness, loneliness and meaninglessness at some point in your life, most often with no fault of your own. Validation and solidarity is the first necessary step to charting maps to navigate the dysfunctional jungles and ravines of our lives. Maps, however essential, will not give you automatic skills to navigate, restructure your ideology, and approach for empowering yourself. There are journeys we all must embark on all by ourselves – family or not, relationship or not; our personal, spiritual and mental growth.
So, I may have some sort of scientific backing to my claims. In 2017, psychology experts from four major universities like Vanderbilt, Harvard, Boston and Columbia, got together for “a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs).” They found that while there are broad categories of risk factors and their combinations, which needed to be addressed, there’s no broad category that can accurately predict the chances of someone actually committing suicide above chance levels.
In plain English, it’s nearly impossible to predict suicide in any given set of population. We can’t accurately know the brink of external struggles, beyond which lies the guaranteed ‘point of no return.’ The study also stated “80% of the risk factors are homogenously” shared across populations. Katherine Schreiber on Psychology Today puts it beautifully: “One may, for instance, identify as transgender and gay, struggle with mental illness, recall memories of childhood abuse, feel hopeless, have access to weapons, yet elect not to end one’s own life. This is because the completion of suicide, as well as the intensity and duration of suicidal ideation, are open to moderation and mediation by a range of protective factors, some of which, like risk factors, are unique to sexual minority youth.” Basically, while some of the challenges faced by the queer community are super unique, we all have our shit to deal with. Now this view may not make us feel very special about our struggles, but that is precisely the point. Realising that, regardless of the triers triggering struggles with loneliness and meaningless, we are all in it together.
We have to focus on the preventative methods. Here are some actionable steps; educate yourself and others about mental health, suicide, depression and anxiety. Check yourself; have you adopted the vocabulary and hence black and white perspective of people as either victims or oppressors? Treat mental health conditions as any physical ailments and injuries. Focus on the experience and narrative than the identity of the person alone. Remember that validation is empowering only when it focuses on the strengths of the person you wish to help. Encourage yourself and others to regularly talk to a wise and kind friend or a therapist. Let’s work against the stigma of visiting a therapist. Check on friends who have dropped out ofthe grid for a while or seem sad and unmotivated. Chosen family is all that many of us have.
See, we have so much to do to build resilience in others and ourselves. Let’s get to it. We might want to learn from the silent active confidence of the mother, who raised a strong son in a society that couldn’t make space for him.