Sorry that this thread is super-long, but I think it might be very inspirational to men (as well as women!) who are in the throes of severe depression right now. And I hope it generates some discussion here.

This week, singer Cher revealed her painful struggles with depression. And it made me dwell on how so few men are willing to do the same thing -- even here in 2008.

While depression remains a stigma across societies, for males and females -- just look at Hollywood, where talking about rehab is almost a rite of passage, while depression is more taboo -- I think it's DEFINITELY still harder for males to accept and confront the illness.

And it makes me wish that more male celebs would step up to the plate to talk about it.

Here are some examples from the past that I have found inspiring and helpful.

Two years ago, the Premier of Western Australia (Geoff Gallop) abruptly quit his office. And instead of saying he “wants to spend more time with his family” (as many depressed officials and CEOs would likely have stated), he announced he was suffering from a “debilitating” depression and that he needed treatment, time and rest. His admission earned a lot of praise throughout Australia, and deservedly so. But somehow, I can’t imagine a political leader in places like America, the UK, or Asia doing the same today. Can you?

George Stephanopoulos, the ex-White House political advisor, has in recent years talked about the depression he suffered while doing that job. His openness is applaudable. But it’s certainly not something he felt he could have talked about while it was happening in the 1990s, which would have made even more of an impact on the stigma of mental illness. (Of course, that may be too much to ask or expect of anyone!)

Terry Bradshaw, two-time Super Bowl MVP [American football], deserves admiration for showing the world that even the toughest guys suffer from depression -- and can admit it and get help. "Stigma is incredibly powerful," he said two years ago. "We'll talk about cancer and every other disease, including alcohol and drug abuse, but people do not want to talk about depression. There's something about depression that seems to say, 'I'm a tremendous failure' or 'I'm the biggest wuss there is.'"

Nobody would ever call Bradshaw a wuss or a failure, in uniform or off-the-field. But he says it took all his courage to admit publicly that he suffered from depression (as part of a 2004 campaign to raise awareness of it that he dubbed his 'Depression Tour.').

Some inspiring quotes from Bradshaw: "...I want to tell people that it's okay to be depressed. Lots of people are depressed – you're not alone – and I want them to know that if you're clinically depressed there's a solution for you....Go see your doctor. Go talk to a psychiatrist. And when you get the help you need, you're going to wonder why you didn't do it a long time ago."

Bradshaw says he was diagnosed with clinical depression in 1999. "...It's hard for me to put into words the horrific feeling of being depressed...It is the most sickening feeling in the world when you believe you are miserable and you're all alone....I was drinking a lot, and I didn't like the path I was on...I was frightened by what might happen. I wasn't sure if I was going to drink myself to death...I just could not get out of the hole. The anxiety attacks were frequent and extensive. I had weight loss, which I'd never had before. I couldn't stop crying. And if I wasn't crying, I was angry, bitter, hateful and mean-spirited. I couldn't sleep – couldn't concentrate. It just got crazy."

And Bradshaw today? "When you're clinically depressed, the serotonin in your brain is out of balance and probably always will be out of balance. So I take medication to get that proper balance back. I'll probably have to be on it the rest of my life... The beauty of it is that there are medications that work. Look at me. I'm always happy-go-lucky, and people look at me and find it shocking that I could be depressed."

Another 'tough guy' who has 'come out' is investigative-news correspondent Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. And he's a great inspiration. If you go to the CBS website, "CBS Cares" has a terrific interview with him about his various depressions. One quote from Wallace on the website is: "There's nothing, repeat, nothing to be ashamed of when you're going through a depression. If you get help, the chances of your licking it are really good. But, you have to get yourself onto a safe path.”

Wallace went through some very bleak depressions in his life. Some excerpts of what he says: "You know, you become crazy. I had done a story for 60 Minutes on depression previously, but I had no idea that I was now experiencing it....You just feel hopelessness, hopelessness. When is it going to end? You ask yourself "what's wrong if I take my life?!" I mean, come on. It's just not pain, physical pain...it's even worse than that." Sound familiar, everyone?

Wallace has also described depression this way: ''The sunshine means nothing to you at all. The seasons, friends, good food mean nothing. All you focus on is yourself and how bad you feel."

Amazingly (or maybe not so amazingly!), one of his GPs essentially told him to snap out of it and "get your act together," says Wallace. "He was saying 'Mike, you don't want to go public with depression. It's bad for you.' I swear, what I was being told was 'it's bad for your image.'" Fortunately, Wallace didn't listen to him.

Wallace thinks one of his depressions was triggered after he broke his wrist playing tennis. (Experts do say that such physical injuries or infections can trigger depression in people who are susceptible to it.)

Back in 1996, Wallace and the late Art Buchwald (humorist/columnist) made 'male-depression history,' when they went on CNN's Larry King show to talk about their illnesses. Wallace talked about his Zoloft and his psychotherapy. Buchwald cracked jokes and talked about his lithium. The two men were very close friends with novelist William Styron, who also admitted to suffering from depression (and who wrote an excellent book about it.) The three men called themselves "The Blues Brothers," and would always try and lift each other up during the darkest days.

(Styron, btw, disliked the term 'depression,' calling it "a true wimp of a word for such a major illness." I couldn't agree more. He also brilliantly described the condition in this way: "In severe depression, the entire body and spirit of a person is in a state of shipwreck, of desolate lostness. Nothing animates the body or spirit. It's a total wipeout.'')

In the middle of that 1996 show, Larry King later said that he realized something truly extraordinary was happening. “I knew it was amazing as it was happening,” said King, who also admitted that he had taken ADs for a depression. “I knew we had broken ground.” In fact, it became the most requested transcript of any show in CNN’s history.

That same year (1996), former U.S. National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane courageously wrote a magazine column, revealing his depression. He said that, after his failed suicide attempt, the "most astonishing" thing to him was the number of U.S. Senators and members of Congress who confided to him that they had also attempted to take their lives at various times.

"The pathology of depression is deceptively simple," he wrote. "The containment of severe stress--the bottling up of one's problems without communicating them to others--contributes to a chemical imbalance that impairs one's ability to function normally and induces a feeling of despair and hopelessness. If unrelieved by talk, therapy or medical treatment, the chemical imbalance induces a spiral of decline, which leads ultimately to utter paralysis and self-destruction."

Finally -- yes, this post will soon come to an end! -- one of the best descriptions of depression that I have ever heard came from biologist Lewis Wolpert, the London-based Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, who stepped forward to admit his own depression -- and write a book about it.

"Until one has experienced a debilitating severe depression it is hard to understand the feelings of those who have it," explains Wolpert. "Severe depression borders on being beyond description: it is not just feeling much lower than usual. It is a quite different state, a state that bears only a tangential resemblance to normal emotion. It deserves some new and special word of its own, a word that would somehow encapsulate both the pain and the conviction that no remedy will ever come..."

Wolpert says it was "the worst experience" of his life. "More terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer. I am ashamed to admit that my depression felt worse than her death but it is true. I was in a state that bears no resemblance to anything I had experienced before. It was not just feeling very low, depressed in the commonly used sense of the word. I was seriously ill... There is nothing in literature that adequately describes depression. If you can describe it you haven’t had it.”

(In Wolpert's case, he recovered with ADs and cognitive therapy.)

So......if you are currently wallowing in depression, unable to pull yourself out of bed, or make even the simplest decisions, or are filled with self-blame and self-loathing, I hope you can take some inspiration from these famous guys who have stepped forward to show us all that you have NOTHING to be ashamed of, and that YOU CAN AND WILL GET BETTER!

I just wish there were more of them who were willing to step forward today -- to tear down that stigma once and for all.


This post has been edited by MichaelBlue: Feb 9 2008, 02:19 PM

(((((((( Micheal Blue )))))

This is a wonderful post , It enthralled me ,
from start to finish , Thank you for taking the time and effort to share this with us . Little bit by little bit the stigma of depression is being worn away , just the recognition of it as a clinical illness was a major step , also the fact that virtually every individual has a depressive period during his life is another major step . That moral weakness is nothing to do do with depression will be the next step . Any mind disorder brings fear to most poeple , mainly because it brings
on '' abnormal"" behaviour patterns . and shakes the status quo in families and society.

hugs and again thanks for this marvelous thoughtful post . Hedge

You have a lot more to lose if everyone thinks your a "Tough Guy" and you become depressed. Depression is so personal that no well person will ever understand.
My denial was intense, because I had a lot of pride and I wouldn't accept the fact that I was getting depressed. Pride can only take you so far until you crack.
Doug

i have to agree -- great post.

i'm always surprised by the celebrities that do come out with their depression because you would never have guessed by their public image -- the only thing that we really know about them.

Here, here. Excellent post. I have noticed on here, and on Daily Strength depression communities, that probably 80% of the posts are by women. Surely more men then that suffer from depression. Nothing against you women out there, but I could relate a lot better if more men were posting.
Greg

Hi Greg ,

You are right , women have more ease about admitting fragility , than men , due to role models maybe , you know men are expected to be ''Strong "" . Many men are in denial of their depression , and sadly take longer to go to a doctor to get help . This topic may help more men to feel Okay with their depression , and that can only be a good thing .

Hugs hedge

Hedge-- Good point. Men are supposed to be "strong." And sadness isn't "macho." And "real men get stressed -- not depressed!" -- and all that similar hogwash.

So depressed men often go into denial about it. Or they 'act out' the depression in other ways (i.e. drinking, fighting, womanizing, intimacy issues, neglecting wife and kids, irritability, road rage, domestic violence, heart disease, workaholism, self-sabotaging their careers). Even many of the men who DO seek treatment feel compelled to keep it a secret -- even from their closest relations.

The sad irony is that by keeping it a secret (from themselves and/or their loved ones), their descent into darkness can be even steeper. There's even a phrase for it: "Covert Depression."

One Harvard researcher, psychoanalyst Terrence Real, has written a book about how men hide their depressions. In an interview, he made the following interesting observations:

"When I'm dealing with a depressed man, I'm dealing with a man who has been cut off. So the work I do... is about teaching men the relational skills that have literally sometimes been beaten out of them as children. In the same way that women grouped together a generation ago to help each other learn skills around assertiveness and power, men need to do that around relatedness....I deal with a lot of entrepreneurial guys, who are now in their 50s and 60s. They've made their 'screw you' money and have several million in the bank. Their wives hate their guts and their kids are alienated. I have one guy whose kids call him an 'occasionally visiting autocrat.' One of his daughters calls him 'a blank check and a smile.'"

Psychologist William Pollack, another Harvard expert on male depression, says than men's rate of depression may be nearly equal to women's. (And on suicide rates, men outnumber women 4:1).

Finally, another researcher, psychologist John Gottman, thinks that men may even feel their feelings MORE strongly than women (which is why they may find emotions more aversive). He had some couples in a lab, and he wired them to see their autonomic nervous-response reactions to all kinds of situations as they moved about: fighting, talking, doing business or whatever. The surprising result was that men had higher physiological rates of arousal in the same emotional transaction than women did.

Interesting stuff, huh? Plenty of food for thought!

This post has been edited by MichaelBlue: Feb 9 2008, 02:21 PM

Successful suicides. Women attempt more often, but men are way more successful. Women tend to use less lethal, ineffective, methods like pills. Men often fatally shoot themselves. Good stuff Michael, keep it coming!


(And on suicide rates, men outnumber women 4:1).

Ahhh...important point. In fact, women attempt suicide about 3x as often as men. Thnx, Gaugreg.

This post has been edited by MichaelBlue: Feb 9 2008, 02:46 PM

I just wanted to recommend a few truly excellent books about depression, written by men who have suffered deeply from it. In my own darkest moments -- when I could barely accomplish anything with each day -- I found a lot of comfort and insight from them....

1. "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," by Andrew Solomon (journalist)
2. "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," by William Styron (novelist/essayist)
3. "Malignant Sadness: An Anatomy of Depression," by Lewis Wolpert (biologist)
4. "I Don't Want To Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression," by Terrence Real (psychotherapist/researcher)

I also want to share a few excerpts from Harvard's Terrence Real (from interviews and/or his book), as I think he's especially brilliant on the topic of male depression from a psychotherapeutic point of view. In his view, depressed men typically engage in a form of 'covert depression' that inevitably (hopefully) leads to 'overt depression.'

Here goes:

"I say that most guys are about as likely to get help for depression as they are to ask for directions and for much the same reason. It is unmanly to be vulnerable. It is unmanly to need help. We do not like men to be too emotional or vulnerable, and a depressed man is both. A depressed man has literally been overwhelmed by his feelings. This sets up what I call double shame. The guy gets depressed about being depressed. He gets ashamed about feeling shame, and he goes into hiding. Sometimes he hides it from others, and in covert depression, he hides it so well he almost succeeds in hiding it from himself."

"My dad was a depressed man who did not know he was depressed, and he was very difficult to live with. His father was a depressed angry man, and I vowed that my two boys were not going to say that about me. I have had bouts with depression and also with acting out. I have gone through a pretty extensive amount of work to fix that. So, this is all very personal to me. I say that depression in men runs through generations like a fire in the woods from father to son to father to son to father to son until somebody turns around and faces it. I do not think it is just an issue for that man. I say that man is a hero who brings peace to the men before him and spares the children that come after him. This is not just about you, it is about you and your father and your children."

"Men are starting to get the message that depression is a biological disease. It is just like diabetes, and you are an idiot if you do not get help. A lot of men, however, still feel like it is a moral issue. They feel they should be able to tough it out because getting help for something like a bad mood is being a wimp. These men are simply wrong. You do not have to live like that."

"When I am dealing with a depressed man, it is about being cut off from other people and his own emotions.... I think women are one of the greatest unrecognized forces in men's health. Most of the men who come to see me are brought by women. They are what I call wife-mandated referrals."

"Overtly depressed men have pain. Covertly depressed men have troubles. With covertly depressed men, often times they are not in pain, but the people around them are in pain. If you have a guy who is self-medicating, irritable, suddenly very distant, but thinks he is fine, you can ask his wife and kids how he is doing. Then, you'll get quite a different story. People around a covertly depressed man will probably recognize the issue better than the man."

"When a covertly depressed man’s connection to the object of his addiction is undisturbed, he feels good about himself. But when connection to that object is disrupted - when the cocaine runs out, the credit cards reach their limit, the affair ends - his sense of self-worth plummets, and his hidden depression begins to unfold. Such 'withdrawal' drives him back to the drug, the achievements at work, or the next sexual conquest…. The difference between the normal and the addictive use of these substances or activities is the difference between enhancing an already adequate sense of self-esteem and desperately propping up an inadequate one."

"[A covertly depressed man] doesn’t see life as it truly is. He is working his way toward a bottom...The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression... Not until the man has stopped running can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior."

Thoughts, anyone?

This post has been edited by MichaelBlue: Feb 9 2008, 02:36 PM

My Hero growing up was John Wayne and when I was beginning to feel depressed, I was pretty sure that John wouldn't publicly admit it, so I toughed it out til the end. I felt like I was on a sinking life raft with no hope of rescue. I acted tough for 27 yrs on my job and when I got sick and couldn't work anymore, well that began my depression, because a tough guy doesn't sit at home and not work. I have recovered from 6 yrs of depression and I have learned that acting tough is fine, but being HAPPY completes me. I replaced negative habits with positive ones.
Doug

This post has been edited by duggie: Feb 9 2008, 03:08 PM

Thanks for making this great thread Michael. It is definitely inspirational to men with depression. I had no idea that there were any popular male icons who were open about their depression. If these guys are brave enough to reveal this to the public, I should not feel so ashamed to admit this my friends.

During my major depression, I came to terms with the stigma associated with depression and was open about admitting it and recognizing it as a disease. After I recovered, I thought that I had put it all behind me. Slowly, the stigma crept back into my mind again. As I was becoming successful in life once again, I started to feel that my depression-filled past was something that was best kept hidden if I wanted to accomplish all that I wanted in life. For these past few years, I have continued to have ups and downs, as I have not been able to get rid of my depression completely. During this time, I have been doing intense personal development, trying to improve my self confidence, social skills, work habits, and health. I had a lot of problems with consistency and I kept beating myself for not improving as quickly as I'd like. I blamed my problems on personal weakness, although now I see that it was depression. I am starting to see just how much my mood influences what I'm capable of doing.

As men, we're taught to not make excuses for our failure. That's what I think is the biggest contributor to the male depression stigma. Even though I had recognized years ago just how powerful depression is, the stigma was overwhelming. I'm no tough guy, but like most other men, I like to think that I am man enough to take responsibility for my own actions. Distinguishing between self-motivated actions and depression-driven actions can be difficult, and the first bits of self doubt from this open a crack to let the stigma in.

I feel good getting this out and talking about it.

Wow, Doug -- what a tough road to follow (the John Wayne approach to life), but I'm glad to hear about your happy ending. The hard-boiled American on the frontier! -- seeing everything around him in black-and-white. It always seemed to me that he played the same macho-swaggering character over and over and over -- but maybe that's what made him so enjoyable to watch. I wonder if he was that tough in real life, though.

All best.