Men - Beyond Mental Health

The solution for male drift isn't found in mental health solutions

The modern western world is aflutter with a new vocabulary that empowers and entitles everyone to the right to mental health and it has become an excuse that omits the individual from taking responsibility.  At the core of what I stand for, is the right of responsibility, and so even as we look at the facts that men have higher rates of suicide, 3-4x higher than women actually, and this implies an obvious link to mental health, I am not here to find a mental health answer to the problem.  There are plenty of facts we can point to as to how men are impacted by today's society in ways that are negatively affecting their mental health; loneliness and lower rates of dating and marriage, lower GPA’s, lower rates of college application and lower rates of college graduation, higher rates of living at home with parents, and higher rates of joblessness, and so on.

And while we could have a rousing conversation about how to fix all of that, there already are amazing scholars who are invested in solving those problems.  However, I am asking us to look deeper.  The modern era of mental health might just be a bandaid that doesn’t actually fix the problem, even as the vast majority of prescriptions that are handed out and fed into our bodies, often create more problems than they fix.  Meanwhile, the labels that everything and everyone now has, are merely a crutch for an identity that actually isn’t real, and many people are left feeling lost and disconnected from themselves, as much as they are disconnected from one another.  

The answer that takes us deeper requires us to look into the deep dark history of patriarchy and the existential experience of being human, and get comfortable with the reality that we all (all genders) created this together.  Although these things happened generations before us, the reality is that we are all here now, and it is up to us to change it.   So we can either continue to be victims to the choices of our ancestors, or we can change it for our children’s children.

To change it, we must come together as a collective humanity, no longer divided and competitive in our differences, clinging to our labels, and stand for collaborism.  To get there we must recognize and own each of our individual contributions - as a person, as a gender, as a collective species even backwards through the generations - and we must forgive ourselves and each other and our ancestors.   From that place, we will find a new awareness of our connection to one another, and to the earth itself, and form new patterns of existence that create instead of destroy.  

To that end, I am starting with having the conversations there are not words for— the ones that lead us towards a path of understanding and creating an awareness from which we can see our connection and find the heart of forgiveness.   From these conversations will come the new language to move forward with.

~and onward