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    #51
    The Rolling Stone article Ursus posted is very good.

    One thing mentioned in it and other articles about men's mental health that really hit me like a brick wall in the last few years is the shrinking of your social circle when you have a kid, and when your friends begin to have kids (I think I was the first, I'm a few years older than most of my friends, but not by much). Nobody has the time to see you anymore. And I'm sure people want to see me but I'm just too exhausted from work and being a father to see them either. Add to that an exodus from London - which is actually only a few people, but basically the key people in concentric circles of friends - and my social life shrunk dramatically in the space of about two years. After work drinks? Gone. Softball team? Gone. Ball hockey team? Gone. Every big match in the pub with friends? Gone. Parenting was too important.

    It's happened to my wife too, but she is best friends with her sister and local, so she knows a bunch of people and so it hasn't been quite so bad. I've always let her go out on the weekends, she can stay out late and get pissed and not feel it in the mornings.

    I'm okay and I think I've gotten through the worst of it, but it really sucked for about two years. My wife has generally been supportive - she has insisted I could go out more on the weekends than I do - but I did have to basically put forth an ultimatum - I'm playing softball again in 2018 (a weekday sport here) because I need to have some sort of social life to look forward to otherwise I'm gonna be real fucking miserable to be around.

    Comment


      #52
      And how much evidence is there that the incidence of suicides has been exacerbated by the roll out of Universal Credit?

      A: Loads

      (But of course, I have to protect my sources)

      Comment


        #53
        Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
        I'm not really sure. That's part of the problem. Maybe draw or play guitar. Those are things I've tried. I could try writing, but that always gives me anxiety.
        It's most important that you find something that makes you feel good and that works for you. No-one but you can assess those things, so my two cents are likely irrelevant. Here they are anyway.

        When I just started my PhD I was a bit isolated, so I could do with a creative outlet. Music runs in the family, and I quite fancy dicking around with it, so this seemed like the right direction. I bought myself a cheap acoustic guitar, and joined a basic course that the university offered in their cultural evening program. Those were mostly meant for undergraduate and master's students (PhD students are employees here, rather than students), but I was shoehorned in anyway.

        I didn't really get anywhere.

        I did enjoy hanging out with the perfectly fine group of people in that class. However, I barely found the time to practice during the week, so I would be unprepared for the next course session, which would teach me some stuff, which I then neglected to practice during the week. This is purely self-inflicted, but it was clear that this was not the way that worked for me at that stage of my life.

        I ended up involving myself with music in a different way. My daily commute was quite long, so I downloaded loads of new albums on my MP3 player, listened to a boatload of new music every year since, and I would compile end-of-year lists that would be the soundtrack of the winter holidays period*. I set myself some rules: tracks had to appear on albums released in that calendar year (no live registrations, no best-of compilations unless it's the infamous new track), maximum of two tracks per parent album, and the whole list must fit on a CD (so 80-minute time limit)**. The creative bit is to try various combinations of disparate tracks to make sure that the entire list sounds good, and I find this a both challenging and fun task. Plus, I expose myself to a range of new music that I may not hear otherwise. NPR's All Songs Considered helped me a lot in finding new stuff.

        The conclusion of this overlong paragraph is: while at that stage of my life guitar classes were not the way, the core concept of getting busy with music was the right instinct for me. Having this creative outlet is giving a nice extra dimension to my daily life, and the results are not really relevant to anyone so it's pleasingly low-stakes. It works for me. Key was to identify that being busy with music in general was making me feel good, and then it was a matter of finding the right form to express that.

        So find your form. Try something out. If it doesn't work out, don't beat yourself up about it and just try something else. If it gives you anxiety, it's not the right form. Whatever it is, it should add some color to your life, at little expense (financial or otherwise).

        I still have the guitar. It's been a decade. Maybe I'll learn to play it someday, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll learn another language instead. Que sera sera, I suppose.

        *I'm still a bit angry at Run The Jewels for surprise releasing their third album on Christmas Eve 2016, three weeks earlier than scheduled: I suddenly had to recompile. But this is another self-inflicted problem, and a very first-world one at that.

        **bonus rule: rules are there to be broken. Keeping it lighthearted works well for me here.

        Comment


          #54
          Without, i hope, belittling any of the issues raised in this thread and in the Rolling Stone piece, let alone anyone's experiences that correlate with their findings, i would like to zoom out a little bit on this subject. (i'm going to edit something i wrote last year, which talks rather dryly about suicide data; please stop reading if my tone or angle are upsetting.)

          Suicides in the UK, and in many western countries, are on a long-term downward trend. Fewer Brits killed themselves last year than at any time since records began to be kept, forty years ago. The decline is steepest among middle-aged men, although they still are the people most likely to kill themselves.

          There's also the matter of the gender suicide paradox. Almost everywhere in the world where data on the subject exist, women are found to ideate suicide and attempt it significantly more often than men do. However, more men than women do actually kill themselves [1]; in the US, i think men are about 10 times more likely to 'succeed' per attempt [2].

          Delving deeper into those numbers, it seems that LGB people try to kill themselves substantially more often than straight folk; trans people way more than cis; Black people more than white [3]; young adults more than the middle-aged. As far as ideation goes, the imbalances look to be even more extreme. (Data are obviously less reliable for registering thoughts and attempts than deaths.) White middle-aged men are among the groups of people least likely to attempt to kill themselves. And yet.

          All sorts of conclusions could be drawn from this. Among the most insidious is that young women (who are among the most depressed, most medicated, most self-harming, most likely to attempt suicide, and least likely to succeed) are not 'serious' about killing themselves. It's a short and sadly all too frequent step from there to label these women as attention seekers.

          i hope this doesn't come off as whataboutery. i've no doubt that the conditions of life for plenty of middle-aged men are as described on this thread, and don't dispute that those conditions are very important factors in why men kill themselves. This isn't or shouldn't be a zero-sum issue.

          But i'm concerned that an excessive focus on rugged individualism or emotion-proof masculinity in explaining suicide might obscure what drives the attempts that do not fit that description, and distort the ways in which sadness, anger, hurt, trauma, guilt, etc, are imagined to affect others, especially minorities, differently.

          It might also obscure the ways in which men's 'success' in killing themselves might be part of a continuum of lethal violence. In the US, men are responsible for an estimated 90-95% of murder-suicides, and usually their victims are intimate partners and family members, including their own children. Almost all of these killings are via legally owned firearms.


          [1] Except perhaps in rural China, where more women than men are reported to kill themselves.

          [2] The highest ratios of men-to-women in deaths by suicide are found in eastern European countries. High rates of alcoholism among men have been cited as one possible contributing factor.

          [3] In the US, Black men 'succeed' in killing themselves much less often than white men do, probably because they're less likely to have access to firearms.


          Sources include:

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
          http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2016registrations
          http://save.org/about-suicide/suicide-facts/
          http://www.thetrevorproject.org/reso...about-suicide/
          http://vpc.org/press/eleven-murder-s...c-study-finds/
          http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492308/
          http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6107173/
          Kathy McKay et al: Women and suicide: beyond the gender paradox

          http://www.samaritans.org/
          Last edited by laverte; 03-06-2019, 20:14.

          Comment


            #55
            Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
            I'm not really sure. That's part of the problem. Maybe draw or play guitar. Those are things I've tried. I could try writing, but that always gives me anxiety.
            It gives most people anxiety. That's part of the process.

            Comment


              #56
              Originally posted by laverte View Post
              Without, i hope, belittling any of the issues raised in this thread and in the Rolling Stone piece, let alone anyone's experiences that correlate with their findings, i would like to zoom out a little bit on this subject. (i'm going to edit something i wrote last year, which talks rather dryly about suicide data; please stop reading if my tone or angle are upsetting.)

              Suicides in the UK, and in many western countries, are on a long-term downward trend. Fewer Brits killed themselves last year than at any time since records began to be kept, forty years ago. The decline is steepest among middle-aged men, although they still are the people most likely to kill themselves.

              There's also the matter of the gender suicide paradox. Almost everywhere in the world where data on the subject exist, women are found to ideate suicide and attempt it significantly more often than men do. However, more men than women do actually kill themselves [1]; in the US, i think men are about 10 times more likely to 'succeed' per attempt [2].

              Delving deeper into those numbers, it seems that LGB people try to kill themselves substantially more often than straight folk; trans people way more than cis; Black people more than white [3]; young adults more than the middle-aged. As far as ideation goes, the imbalances look to be even more extreme. (Data are obviously less reliable for registering thoughts and attempts than deaths.) White middle-aged men are among the groups of people least likely to attempt to kill themselves. And yet.

              All sorts of conclusions could be drawn from this. Among the most insidious is that young women (who are among the most depressed, most medicated, most self-harming, most likely to attempt suicide, and least likely to succeed) are not 'serious' about killing themselves. It's a short and sadly all too frequent step from there to label these women as attention seekers.

              i hope this doesn't come off as whataboutery. i've no doubt that the conditions of life for plenty of middle-aged men are as described on this thread, and don't dispute that those conditions are very important factors in why men kill themselves. This isn't or shouldn't be a zero-sum issue.

              But i'm concerned that an excessive focus on rugged individualism or emotion-proof masculinity in explaining suicide might obscure what drives the attempts that do not fit that description, and distort the ways in which sadness, anger, hurt, trauma, guilt, etc, are imagined to affect others, especially minorities, differently.

              It might also obscure the ways in which men's 'success' in killing themselves might be part of a continuum of lethal violence. In the US, men are responsible for an estimated 90-95% of murder-suicides, and usually their victims are intimate partners and family members, including their own children. Almost all of these killings are via legally owned firearms.


              [1] Except perhaps in rural China, where more women than men are reported to kill themselves.

              [2] The highest ratios of men-to-women in deaths by suicide are found in eastern European countries. High rates of alcoholism among men have been cited as one possible contributing factor.

              [3] In the US, Black men 'succeed' in killing themselves much less often than white men do, probably because they're less likely to have access to firearms.


              Sources include:

              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
              http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2016registrations
              http://save.org/about-suicide/suicide-facts/
              http://www.thetrevorproject.org/reso...about-suicide/
              http://vpc.org/press/eleven-murder-s...c-study-finds/
              http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492308/
              http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6107173/
              Kathy McKay et al: Women and suicide: beyond the gender paradox

              http://www.samaritans.org/

              I don’t know about the UK, but it’s getting worse in the US.

              https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/numbers

              It’s especially alarming given that public education has generally gotten better over the last 20 years and we’’d expect psychiatry to become more effective. Or at least, that’s how science is supposed to work.

              It’s especially noteworthy that the numbers continue to climb among young people while other measures of their overall well-being - teenage pregnancy, drug use, violent crime overall - have generally improved in the last few decades.
              Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 03-06-2019, 20:48.

              Comment


                #57
                I would posit that US attitudes towards guns are the primary reason for the differences in trends.

                Comment


                  #58
                  That has a big influence on the total numbers but I don’t see how it would be driving an increase, because, unless I’m missing something, access to guns isn’t really increasing, is it? It was always very high in the US and, last I looked, the percentage of people who own guns is actually decreasing.

                  The number owned per gun-owner is increasing, which is alarming for all kinds of reasons. But it doesn’t take an arsenal to kill oneself.

                  Comment


                    #59
                    I see it as an increasing overlap between the population most at risk (for all of the reasons discussed in the article and the thread) and the population that has easy access to guns.

                    The first part of that equation isn't unique to the US, but the second part largely is.

                    Comment


                      #60
                      That's probably true.

                      I recently tried googling "our culture is terrible" to see if anyone else had thoughts. All the hits were about either "corporate culture" (which I suspect isn't as much of a thing as TED talks and consultants would have us think) and right-wing screeds against teh gays and PC gone mad and what not.

                      That explains a lot, I think.

                      Comment


                        #61
                        Corporate culture is definitely a thing, but the fact that it has become so commoditised is a symptom of the larger issue.

                        I've found that a number of the critiques that resonate with me are grounded to a certain extent in religion, even though I have virtually always been a harsh critic of the more popular forms of that impulse. I very much expect that I will do some kind of retreat at some point in the next ten years, though I have no idea what form it will take.

                        Comment


                          #62
                          That's an interesting remark. You think you will move towards a religion or some sort of spiritual position?

                          Comment


                            #63
                            The statistic about more women in rural China committing suicide than men. It seems to be largely due to access to poisonous enough stuff that you can ingest. Women are much more likely than men to attempt suicide by swallowing something. In the West, that's usually tablets and people often don't have access to the quantity needed, and emergency care is good enough that you can often be rescued before the damage is insurmountable. In China, the rural women have access to rat poison, fertiliser, toxic pesticides, etc, and they are often far from any effective medical care. There are other factors involved, but these ones are quite key.

                            Comment


                              #64
                              I have found that my religious pursuits is the only thing that has really helped my issues, though the stuff I'm into is more "spiritual" than religious, per se. If I'd tried to remain a geology or econ major instead of switching to religion and philosophy, my career would have turned out better, probably, but I'd have probably killed myself in my 20s, so there's that.

                              I believe that spirituality and all this woo is just using a specific language of images and myths to do psychology in a different way, but that works for me - at least sort of sometimes. It might not work at all for people who didn't grow up in that milieu. I do what's called centering prayer, which is a kind of meditation, and there's a thing called welcoming prayer which I'm still learning about. There are books on it that anyone can understand, I think. The distinction between the two is a bit ambiguous and controversial, but it's all just words and I know I've gotten more out of my time with my "spiritual development" guide/director than I have out of the regular psychiatrists and psychologists I've seen, so I'll roll with that. (Of course, if I had better insurance, maybe I'd be able to find better therapists.)

                              I've also got out a lot of some Buddhist stuff - Pema Chodron, etc. And I'm currently reading Kristen Neff's books about self-compassion. She's a psychologist, but also a Buddhist and has a pleasant 70s vibe.

                              I'd like to do some more retreats and perhaps go to the Living School, which is one of Richard Rohr's things, or the Vision Quest thing with the Animas Institute, but I can't afford it right now. Money is very tight. (They aren't bilking people, but just the cost of taking that much time off and finding a dogsitter and travelling out west is more than I can handle right now). I did the Men's Rite of Passage with Illuman in West Virginia a few years back and am now helping out with a similar thing for young men that some guys from my church started about 12 years ago. A lot of that also comes from Richard Rohr's work on the need for "initiation" in Adam's Return, but the book of his that I'd recommend to anyone is called Falling Upward.

                              I don't read or practice as much as I probably should, because it can all just be a bit much and usually the only way to feel better in the short run is to go for long walks and watch comedy. Like last night I started watching the third season of Documentary Now and felt better than I had in weeks.

                              Comment


                                #65
                                Maybe I should go to a retreat at Reed's

                                He's way ahead of me here.

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