Healthy men are crucial to healthy culture
Amid the confluence of a pandemic, its mutating
variants, the uneven production and delivery of vaccines, the economic fallout,
potentially as damaging as some kind of military-engagement devastation, this
morning Dr. Robert Whitley, as associate professor of psychiatry at McGill
University and a research scientist at the Douglas Research Centre (also
associated with McGill) contributed a highly provocative piece to the CBC. Entitled,
“Alarming numbers around men’s mental health indicate need foo national
response,” Dr. Whitley documents some shocking, trend-shaping, and tragic
information:
·
Men account for 75% of suicides in Canada,
an average of 50 men per week dying of suicide.
·
Canadian men are around three times more likely
to experience addiction and substance abuse compared to Canadian women.
·
In B.C. the Coroner’s Service reports that
males accounted for 81% of drug overdose deaths in that province in 2020.
·
Statistics Canada noted that one in four
boys do not graduate from high school on time, a rate significantly higher than
for girls
·
A study found that nearly 9% of men aged
25 to 34 never graduate from high school, almost double the rate for similarly
aged women
·
4 in 10 university students are male and a
lack of post0-secondary education leaves people ill-equipped for the new
economy
·
The unemployment rate for
25029-year-old-men who are actively seeking work is twice that of similarly
aged women, the second-largest gender gap in the OECD
·
A massive decline in traditional
blue-collar industries leaving fewer jobs for unskilled workers, especially in
rural areas, and medium sized towns with few alternatives. Absence from the
workforce can leave people bereft of pride and purpose, contributing to
despair, alienation and isolation.
·
Angus-Reid survey found that 63% of
18-34-year-old Canadian men experienced considerable loneliness and isolation,
compared to 53% of similarly aged women
·
Evidence suggest that men underutilize
mental health services, with women being three times more likely to seek such help
·
Studies indicate that men tend to prefer
more informal action-based or group-based mental health services to 1-on-1 talk
therapy
·
The U.K., House of Commons launched an
inquiry into the mental health of men and boys in 2019, a decision supported by
all political parties
Dr. Whitley calls for a need to create a parliamentary
inquiry in Canada on men’s mental health issues, to include a critical examination
of policies and programs in education, employment and health care.
Before we get to the mountain of empirical data about
employment and educational trends, let’s pause, just for a few moments and cast
our gaze over what can be legitimately termed “male culture” in Canada. We are,
and have been for a century, raised in such pathetic aphorisms as “don’t cry,
big boys don’t cry!” and “suck it up, you’ll be alright!” “don’t tell me you’re
sick, when you really don’t want to go to school,” and even, deplorably, “real
boys don’t play house, dolls”….And such epithets come from the mouths of both
mothers and fathers, all of them determined to raise a young boy who is
battle-tested and therefore battle-ready, in order to ‘take on the world’. And
given that ‘battle’ imagery, and the cultural icons, myths, heroes and movies
that celebrate all things military/war/battle/espionage/power/winners and the
obvious and tragic opposites, losers/prisoners/victims/failure/loss/ and the
multiple contributing factors that demean others (stupidity/ignorance/innocence/weakness/unpreparedness/lack
of discipline/defiance of authority/) have come to saturate not only the
military establishments, but also the organizational hierarchies, power
structures, (pyramidal, autocratic, single executive,) and the cultural
conventions that sustain those structures, how can we be surprised?
Sycophancy was not invented by the Republican Senators
in the U.S. Congress. It abounds in every hierarchical organization on the continent.
And every rookie recruit knows implicitly that he must “pay his dues” and “pay
homage” to the traditions, the ethos and the personalities of those currently in
charge and those on whose shoulders the edifice was built. Power rains, reigns
and reins ubiquitously….downward, regally, and constrictingly of innovation,
free, open and honest communication in those pyramidal top-heavy organizations
whose legacy will infect both men and women for decades, if not centuries. It
is also not accidental, either, to note that women ‘fit’ into such structures
with much greater ease and compliance, and conformity, knowing that ‘pleasing’ those
in power ‘will attract more flies’ than vinegar (just like sugar!)
And, conversely, young boys and emerging adult men, in
our valiant and often misguided effort to identify as “different” from our
female peers, take great pleasure in the grease and oil of a machine that needs
fixing, and also take great umbrage at participating orally in classes that are
designed to analyse critically Jane Austen’s or Emily Bronte’s or George Elliot’s
novels, of Emily Dickinson’s or Margaret Avison’s poems. We engage eagerly in
all social activities that put the latest football games, and especially the
most onerous tackles in the spotlight. In short, we are steeped, brewed, casked
in a culture of brittle, narrow, strictly enforced masculinity. And that
masculinity, while not sustainable, is suffering from an onslaught of erosive
forces over which neither individual males, nor even groups of males have much
if any control.
Those is power, making decisions, mostly male, are so
obsessed with their/our own immediate personal gratification (wages, ambition,
power symbols, records, trophies, and legacies) that we care not a ‘fig’ for
how we might be influencing generations of young men who will inevitably
emulate our “success”. We are trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to strive for
success. And that success, we are indoctrinated to believe, and to embody, and
to enhance, will assure us of our desired status and station: married, with
achieving children, a beautiful home, a nice car, trendy vacations, a pension
plan and a coterie of friends. Of course, while there is a grain of truth in
the myth, there is also a large “dose of salt” that minimizes life’s
complexities, life’s challenges, life’s sicknesses, divorces, deaths,
bankruptcies, firings, redundancies, economic depressions, global recessions,
pandemics, global warmings, and the rising and receding tides of technologies,
machines, medical interventions and evolving cultural models and demands. And, contrary
to popular opinion, learning how to become a professional golfer, or
scholarship hockey or football athlete may or may not entail those highly impacting
experiences of set-back, interruption, defamation, and threat that can and
often will overtake even the most “successful”.
Add to this bildungsroman that attaches to and identifies
each adolescent male who is emerging into adulthood, a masculine cultural
stereotype that silently whispers, “You have to get through this alone,”
especially if the problem/pain/discomfort/anxiety/fear/failure does not include
a physical, observable and treatable bodily injury. Strength, traditionally, and
almost sacredly, is both developed and displayed by an individual, except in
team sports, where individual skills embodied by those special athletes, stand
out and define excellence for the coaches, other team members and certainly the
parents. While Canada’s college applicants’ landscape differs from that of a
U.S. college applicant, it is not accidental, nor irrelevant in a general
sense, to note that many U.S. parents are so committed to their young son’s or
daughter’s admission to a ‘first class school’ that they turn the complete routine
and budget of their family into a production house to develop athletic skills
at the highest and most costly level, in order to pave their child’s entry into
those schools. Imitation, while considered by some to be the greatest form of flattery,
is also a potential cultural mimicking that warrants deep and critical
examination.
However, any such public examination, I fear, will
devolve into a combination of individual biographies, (case histories) as well
as a compilation of sociological, statistical data, whose curves and
predictions will then be interpreted and translated into policies that plow
public dollars into the “problem’ as if, to repeat, what we do in all other
instances of public angst can and will assuage all vestiges of public guilt,
shame, responsibility and lingering attention to a deeply rooted and tenaciously-held
mythology. Our culture is so truth-averse, so deeply ingrained in avoidance of
personal responsibility, especially when it concerns a publicly documented, and
thereby politically radioactive, social and cultural issue. We are very quick
to tap the keys (letters) on our phones and tablets to excoriate individuals
whose lives insult our sense of public decency, public ethics and morality, and
the concomitant “ire” that seems to have seeped (flooded) into our neighbourhoods,
courtrooms, and our public transit systems. On the other hand, we are also very
quick to minimize any public issue that not only appears to be highly complex,
but actually is extremely complicated. And this “avoidance/denial” mechanism
helps us to deflect an authentic and shared and national responsibility for our
own part in the national tragedy. “It’s too big and complicated for me to do
anything about it anyway!” becomes a chorus, if not a national anthem, as we
all look askance and disdain public figures who might actually be invested in
making things better ridiculing their every proposal as ineffective, inadequate,
too costly and motivated primarily by self-interest.
Vacillation between denial and avoidance, on the one
hand, and a public posture that, while attempting to integrate the implications
of research into the proposed recommendations, fails to engage the whole public
consciousness, as well as the shared unconsciousness, will generate a brief flurry
of symptom-directed activity, a few doctoral theses, a plethora of public envelopes
of cash and the needed administrators, and little shift in the tectonic cultural
plates that underpin the continental, if not global, demise of men, and the masculinity-shackles
that impales too many.
Our families, our schools, our colleges and universities,
and our corporations including the public service and the military all share in
helping to generate the problem of masculine mental turbulence, and it will take
all of them, individually and collectively to begin to address this sleeping
and growing malaise. And, too, all of our churches will have to bring out the
individual and the organizational mirrors, and investigate the origins and the histories
of all of our deities, (almost exclusively male) and the hierarchies of dogma,
belief and ritual that have been designed, imposed, sacralized and dissected
for their toxic potency in the lives of millions of men, over centuries.
We have played religious (and pseudo-theological) war
games from the beginning. We have pontificated our “truth” as the one and only.
We have colonized millions with our self-serving, deity-denying power trips, on
all continents, and then rewarded those colonizers with the “blessings of God”
as we conceived HIM to be. The churches, all of them, to a greater or lesser
extent, have traded in the generation of how men and women are to obey their
god, how they are to procreate, with whom they are to procreate, to love and to
dwell with. They have also enjoined in making their models and their ideologies,
and their beliefs sacred and pure, while remaining silent about the inevitable,
undeniable and veritable scepticism, doubt, uncertainty, vagueness, humility
and pathos of their wandering pilgrimages. And while that was continuing, the
churches built organizational structures, pedagogical systems, evangelizing
systems, funding edifices, as well as worship and liturgical traditions that
all contributed in their own way to the kind of tensions we are now witnessing
among men and women around the world.
Naturally, Canadians will focus on the plight of the
men who live here. And that focus will have to include the ravages of both
world wars, including the Canadian patriotic heroes who died and those who
returned from the front, mentally ravaged by what has only recently been legitimized as PTSD, and treated, however
meagerly. And into any new fabric of Canadian culture, will have to be woven
the more recent fibres of the celebration of gay men and trans and bi- men
whose contributions will continue to unfold.
And in the midst of the new tapestries of masculinity,
celebrating the diversity of examples, there will have to be an extensive
effort to disabuse many straight men from their ambivalence, if not outright hostility
to gayness, and to gay men specifically. And in that worthy initiative, the Christian
churches, at least, will have to play a significant role, given that the biblical
injunction against homosexuality continues to plague much theological
interpretation and practice even if it remains under the public radar.
The issue of the mental health and wellness of Canadian
males, while peeking out from behind the many veils of secrecy and avoidance,
will continue to attract researchers, scholars, athletic professionals, and hopefully
theologians and social critics, as well as a bevy of educators steeped in the
multiple dimensions of healthy masculinity. Mothers and fathers, too, of
especially new born boys, would help to begin the process by poring over such
books as “the Wonder of Boys” by Michael Gurian….and then searching for the
many other insightful and supportive works about boys and men that are
appearing in bookstores and on line.
As an integral part of any move toward enhanced mental
health of and for men, the term “toxic masculinity” ( a term coined in the mythopoetic
men’s movement of the 1980’s and 90’s) will have to be tempered at least. It is
not masculinity that by definition is toxic, but the acts by which men are
tragically and persistently sabotaged by other men, themselves deeply burdened
by their own experiences, and too often, their participation in denying
responsibility and certainly in refusing to seek help soon enough to prevent those
tragic acts. And, it says here that the hand of a supportive, courageous,
creative and independent female colleague, partner, friend can and often does
provide the light and the empathy that can neutralize some of the symptoms of
toxic masculinity.
Healthy families, classrooms, organizations, churches and businesses depend on healthy men. And it will take us all to help to move our culture toward a time when the Whitley report will no longer be either so relevant or so urgent.
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