Movember and Men's Suicide. Blog #14

Movember is an international charity raising yearly awareness and funds for men's health issues such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer and men's suicide. This article will focus on men's suicide.

It is a subject very dear to me having been diagnosed and treated for suicidal manic depression for 25 years. My life has changed dramatically 10 years ago. Ever since I haven't had a bad day and I have been on a crusade to take people from a place where happiness, love, connection and purpose are scarce to a place where they are abundant.

Why do people commit suicide ?

Life is a stream, a snowball, a chain reaction. Everything we do originates from a thought, an action, that leads to another thought and action, and so forth and so on. Essentially everything about our life is down to the first few years of our life, the first thoughts we created and their escalation today into our adult life. No one commits suicide overnight. No one is born suicidal. It is a process. We feel out of place one day. We experience rejection. And then we feel down. And we believe there is something wrong about us. And we repeat that thought, that emotion. And the more we repeat them the more we reinforce them. Before soon life is hard. We are depressed. People are bad or can never understand. We feel we are not good enough. It feels as if it has always been like that and will always be like that. We stop feeling altogether. We loose interest in being alive.

Men are not from Mars and Women are not from Venus

One of the fundamental reason there are twice as many suicide amongst men compared to women is not genetic. It is cultural. Of course both genders show organic differences, hence the names and functions of them at the first place, but despite what some people believe nothing is immutable and everything evolves constantly, even our biology. Jordan B Peterson for instance very infamously promotes how men are superior than women in the workplace as they don't need to have babies, therefore are not limited by hormonal reactions. He forgets that in the grand scheme of things, in the history of the universe humans have been around for a relatively short time, have evolved a lot and will keep on evolving in some way or others. Although the structure of bodies will remain the same we understand more and more about how to regulate our internal bio chemistry with thoughts, regardless of our gender.

Jordan B Peterson also forgets at a more general level that anyone that uses hand picked religious anecdotes to demonstrate philosophical points operates on an ancestral, discriminatory and fear based mode. The fear of evolution, the fear of change, the fear of loosing control. Insecure people like him are the main culprit for spreading the virus of toxic masculinity (and the tradition of sexism).

What came first, the egg or the chicken ?

The universal false belief that men and women are fundamentally different in most culture is what perpetrate and reinforce that tradition. We hear all the time how bad drivers women are and how men have no emotional intelligence for instance. The individuals that fit those labels do so because they believe in those beliefs to start with. They heard it from their parents, they observed and absorbed it from their entourage. As they believe they manifest and they eventually end up fulfilling the prophecy. And the more people fall into that trap the more evidences are there to demonstrate and support that universal con.

Men and women have the same propensity for success in any field at a societal level. Minor hormonal discrepancies can be overcome when we start to adapt society to individuals as opposed to adapting people to an old obsolete system only bred by the likes of Jordan B Peterson.

Toxic masculinity

The cultural belief that poisons men so badly in regards to their mental health is that the only dignified place for a man to be is the patriarch within a family or a community. A figure of strength, authority, admiration, void of emotion or non sense (non sense being anything that does not fit into their belief system) in charge of the happiness and pride of its people. A figure that most men can't be... and for those who can will create casualties within the family cell as all other roles have a specific cliche identity not everyone wants to fulfil.

Everyday men remind me of their emotional incongruity by claiming pride into them being sceptical about therapy. I remind them that being sceptical actually equals being scared of something they don't understand, which translates further in being scared of loosing control... There is nothing brave or clever about being skeptical, it takes courage and humility to ask for help on the contrary. I can hardly recall any women ever using that term with me.

Be a man. Boys don't cry. Grow a pair. Don't be a sissy (we call them snowflakes nowadays). You need to man up... are the hypnotic incantations cursing men into repressing their emotions and empathy to others and self. As a direct result men are conditioned not to seek help despite feeling terrible inside to the point of no return for some.

Men literally die everyday because they are being taught that they are not allowed to be weak and if that ever happens, seeking help for being weak is the ultimate humiliation and dishonour. They are being taught that death is a better option than seeking help.

Of course there are men who suffer from depression for other reasons than toxic masculinity but I wanted to highlight how we could start to eradicate a huge proportion of future mental health disorders in men by stop perpetrating the toxic beliefs in our societies.

Rapid Transformational Therapy

To remove toxic masculinity, allow vulnerability and embrace humanity, empathy and balance we must remove the beliefs that create it at the first place. All of our beliefs are stored at a subconscious level. Although with time, work and the right teacher it is possible for some to address their beliefs from the conscious mind, for most, only direct interventions into the subconscious mind will make a significant and lasting change. The king of therapy protocol to remove toxic beliefs and replace them with better, empowering and constructive ones is Rapid Transformational Therapy.

Be a man

What does that mean nowadays anyway ? It means anything we want it to mean. Seeing, experiencing and teaching the world with less prejudice, standards, labels and expectations is the way to construct a new generation of happy, emotionally balanced, connected and harmonious individuals... free from the obsolete disempowering beliefs that have no place in this millennium, the opinion of scared and bitter conservative people and the way we should behave in relation to our gender according to their toxic dogmas. The world is changing and the very existence of Movember reflects just that.