Heartbreaking toll of men too proud to seek help for depression
WHEN you’ve been together a long time, it’s the little things you notice. For Diana Ladyman, coming home one Sunday afternoon after her cleaning job, it was a cup on the kitchen counter and a half-empty teapot that struck her as odd.
‘My husband Philip was a creature of habit,’ she says. ‘He drank tea throughout the day and always made a pot, never a mug. Then he’d wash the pot and leave it on the drainer.’
At 5pm on March 25, 2012, when Diana returned home, her daughter Samantha was busy washing the car while her little boy, Alfie, then four, ran around the garden. But the house was eerily silent.
‘Samantha said she hadn’t seen her dad and I suddenly felt sick,’ says Diana. ‘I started running round the house — I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for — and then I went to the garage, but the door was locked from the inside.
‘Attached to the handle was a note in Philip’s handwriting with the words underlined several times: “Don’t look in the garage. Call the police.” ’
Diana and Philip were childhood sweethearts. Growing up in the village of Stone, near Aylesbury, Bucks, they’d started going out when she was 14 and he was 17.
They married in the parish church four years later and their two children, Samantha, now 37, and Will, 32, were born and grew up in the village.
‘I always used to say just before we went to sleep at night: “As long as we’re together and the children are tucked up in their beds, everything is OK,” ’ says Diana, 58.
HIDDEN STRESS OF THE RECESSION
LIKE most couples, they had ups and downs, particularly during the recession when money was tight. Philip struggled to find work as a builder and Diana increased her cleaning work and was often exhausted.
‘But Philip was the love of my life and I trusted him completely,’ she says. ‘ He was very quiet and private, but there was never anyone else for either of us. We lived for each other and our children.’
She remembers only brief snatches of the immediate aftermath after she found Philip’s note on the garage door.
‘everything started swimming,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t focus. Samantha seemed almost transparent. I remember Alfie running round going: “Nanny, nanny, what’s the matter?” ’
Diana was in such deep shock that she couldn’t remember where the home phone was. Then, when she finally got through to the emergency services, she couldn’t find the words to explain what was happening.
Within minutes, a young policewoman who happened to be in the village turned up and managed to open the garage door. Inside she found Philip, 58, who had hanged himself.
Another police officer arrived and insisted Diana and Samantha stay in the house while t hey waited f or t he paramedics and two ambulances.
‘By then our son Will had arrived and, without anyone saying anything, all three of us knew Dad was dead. It was as if someone had stopped the record. I’ll never forget the shock,’ says Diana.
‘It’s the most bizarre feeling in the world, as if I was in a glass tube, looking out.
‘All I could think about was the children. They’d lost such a lovely dad and his last thought had been for us. He didn’t want us to have the shock of finding him.
‘The toughest thing of all was telling Alfie because that little boy was Philip’s life and Alfie just adored his Grampy.’
MIDDLE-AGED MEN ARE MOST AT RISK
THE number of men who took their own lives reached the highest point ever in 2013, according to figures just published by the Office for National Statistics. The figures show the biggest gulf between men and women since records began. Nearly 79 per cent of the 6,233 people in Britain who took their own lives in 2013 were men. The f i gures also reveal another worrying trend: the highest figures of all were among middle- aged men. While the number of people taking their own lives has dropped across other age groups, it has surged in those born in the Fifties and Sixties. The number of men aged between 45 and 59 who took their own lives was almost 40 per cent higher than it was a decade earlier — they account for a quarter of all deaths by s uicide. Professor Rory O’Connor, who leads the suicide behaviour research laboratory at Glasgow University, says that there has been a huge change in male suicide over the past ten years, with those in the prime of life at the greatest risk.
‘Middle-aged men are caught between two generations,’ he says. ‘Their role models — their fathers and brothers — don’t talk about their emotions,’ he says.
‘But their sons are far more at ease with their feelings and that makes them feel out of step.
‘At the same time, they have the greatest difficulty seeking help as they tend to see it as admitting to weakness.’
Added to this, few middle-aged men have jobs for life, as their father’s generation did. They may have been passed over f or promotion or laid off and are not where they expected to be in life. CALM ( Campaign Against Living Miserably) is a charity dedicated to preventing male suicide. In a recent survey of men and women about the pressures and expectations they face in their daily lives, they found that 42 per cent of men felt under enormous pressure to be strong and stable copers.
At the same time, men were much less likely to seek help when things started to go wrong, preferring to deal with problems and pressures themselves.
‘The research underlines that so often men are their own worst enemies,’ says Jane Powell, the charity’s chief executive.
‘Men need new rules for survival because the traditional strong, silent approach to adversity is l eading to depression and ultimately proving lethal.
‘We have an expectation that men don’t need help to survive — and if they need help, they aren’t proper men. It’s a toxic concept.
‘It helps to be able to talk about these things, but at the moment society’s message is that real men shouldn’t need to talk.’
ANGRY OUTBURSTS A SIGN OF DEPRESSION
MEN who are depressed don’t sit in bed with a tub of ice cream, as women might.
‘They may get angry, drunk and sometimes arrested,’ says Jane Powell. ‘Unless they’re physically ill, they consider that GP services are for women and children.
‘We need to create services that are confidential and anonymous where men can ask f or help without losing face.
‘ expecting men to be solid blocks of physical and mental strength is a terrible burden.’
Professor O’Connor points out that suicide ‘is an expression of unbearable pain — they f eel trapped by thoughts and feelings and powerless to change things.
‘It’s tunnel logic. If I kill myself, then this pain will end.’
Philip Ladyman had been a selfemployed builder, a man who was happy as long as he was busy and providing for his family.
But in the months before he died, work had been scarce and he was worried about money.
Diana had always worked, but the fact her wages were keeping them going clearly upset him.
Just a few weeks before he died, he’d said to her: ‘You have to understand that I’m the hunter gatherer. I should be bringing in the money. I need to be able to provide for my family.’
Men who are depressed or suicidal are adept at hiding their distress, as Diana knows only too well.
She has tried to piece together the events that might have led Philip to such a desperate place. She doesn’t think he’d suffered depression before, but looking back, she can see he had bouts of feeling ‘low’ and had a tendency to take things to heart.
But there were good times even during the week before he ended his life. Yet looking back Diana can see he’d always had difficulty talking about his feelings and that
worries over a lack of work had bothered and disturbed him far more than he let on.
‘His mother, a lovely person, died in 2000 and he found it very difficult to express his grief. He didn’t want me or the children to see he’d been upset or crying,’ she says.
‘Afterwards, I think we became even closer, but then I keep thinking: if we were so close, why did all this happen?’
She wonders now if she didn’t rely on Philip as much as he’d have liked her to. But it’s obvious they had a loving, traditional relationship that worked.
‘I cooked, I cleaned, and I had his dinner on the table every evening. But when it came to the house, he did everything. If I said “There’s a bit of damp . . .” it would be fixed.
‘If I wanted a new bathroom, I had it. The week before he died, he wallpapered the dining room.’
Over Christmas 2011, building work had dried up.
‘Philip tried hard to stay positive, but he was quiet and fed up,’ says Diana.
‘Then a good mate who always put work his way gave it to someone else and he brooded on that — he couldn’t understand why, when he worked so hard, that he’d been overlooked. I think he felt badly betrayed.’
SOME START TO DRINK HEAVILY
A REPORT by the mental health charity Mind — Get It Off Your Chest — in 2009 found that just 23 per cent of men said they would see their GP if they felt low for more than a couple of weeks.
That’s compared to 33 per cent of women, who were also half as likely to see a counsellor to talk about their feelings.
Almost twice as many men as women admitted to getting angry when they were worried and to drinking heavily.
Many felt there were no services specifically for them to ‘get things off their chest’.
Six years later, there is progress. CALM is running the ‘Mandictionary’ campaign with posters across t he country encouraging people to talk about what it is to be a man.
It’s clearly struck a chord, as the charity is struggling to cope with the number of callers to i ts helpline. It seems that when they have a channel of communication they’re comfortable with, men do talk about their feelings.
In the months before he died, Philip had talked about his head being ‘funny’ and ‘not being able to get my head straight’.
Diana had been sufficiently worried to make him an appointment with their GP.
After he died, desperately needing answers, she asked to see his medical notes.
‘I remember that he had got ready and left the house to go to the doctor, but there was no record of that appointment,’ she says. ‘ At the last moment, he didn’t keep it.’
The day Philip died, and Diana had s pent morning going over their family finances.
‘We worked out that whatever happened, thanks to my earnings, we’d be OK,’ she says.
‘It hought we both felt a lot better after that and I went off to work — one of my ladies had asked me to do a special clean that Sunday because she was having a party.’
Before she left, Diana put a roast dinner in the oven and reminded Philip to put the vegetables on at 5pm.
‘He was stood at the sink with his cup of tea and I said: “I won’t stop and have a cup with you as I’ve got to go.” And that was the he t he last thing I said to him. If only I could go back,’ she says, the despair etched on her face.
Samaritans has underlined the need for more support for men from local and regional mental health teams.
MANY FEEL IT’S WEAK TO SEEK HELP
‘THE masculine ideal requires t hat men should never be depressed, anxious or unable to cope and, if they are, they should never admit it,’ says Joe Ferns, director of policy, r esearch and development.
‘This creates a sense that they are not “s upposed” t o be vulnerable. We need to encourage men to see that they can take control of their lives and that acknowledging, talking about and dealing with a problem is a true measure of strength.’
Three years on, Diana’s grief is still raw.
‘As long as I live, I’ll feel I’ve let him down,’ she says, t ears streaming down her face. ‘I s hould have cared f or him better, been less independent, supported him more . . . He was my life, I loved him so much. He was my knight i n shining armour, but I don’t think I told him enough. Without him I’m lost.’
SOBS (Survivors Of Bereavement By Suicide) provides support for anyone affected by suicide: uk-sobs.org.uk; 0300 111 5065. CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) has a helpline and daily webchat for men, 5am to midnight. See thecalmzone.net For support and advice, the Samaritans offer 24-hour help: 08457 90 90 90; samaritans.org