Men’s Mental Health – and finally: spiritual healing.

We must be careful not to misunderstand the word “spiritual”, nor think we can only come to it through religion. The spiritual dimension existed before there were ever religions to give it a name. Many people, both religious and otherwise, have experienced it and they use words like timelessness, boundlessness, oneness, and love to describe it. This is the mystical core at the heart of all religion, yet many who would not consider themselves religious at all tumble into it by accident. They do not see angels, or saints, or witness terrifying revelations , but describe a more abstract experience, marvellous and expansive. It leaves them altered. They no longer need to seek or indeed reject “belief”. They simply know that it is so.

Of course not all who invite such an experience will find it, yet all who do seek it discover that the search alone shifts the focus of their lives away from inner pain and more towards a mindful awareness of life itself. In eastern philosophies there is no separation between the mental life and the spiritual. In addressing one we are always addressing the other. I wrote earlier about the three vessels – the physical, the mental and the spiritual. They are the three legs upon which we stand. Kick one away, or deny its existence altogether, and we are sure to lose our balance.

In secular society, there is a problem with religion; at the state level it is, on the one hand, irrelevant since society is now entirely market driven. On the other, religiously motivated violence is sadly nowadays such a threat to life and limb, religion is only tolerated so long as it does not get out of hand. At the personal level too religion can be seen as lacking any real goodness, that indeed it works contrary to its stated purpose – dividing and persecuting, instead of uniting and embracing our diversity. If the spiritual vessel exists at all nowadays it has been upturned and its contents tipped out. Sadly, this is to deny our true nature, and what we suppress will always come back to haunt us ten fold.

Buried deep in the psyche there is a spiritual function. It is the generator of a current that urges us all towards change, towards transformation and transcendence through the assimilation of energies that rise from both the personal and the collective unconscious. We have no choice in this, it is a part of what we are, a part of what moves us. Through us, nature is evolving psychically. There is nothing supernatural about this; it is an aspiration, a movement towards what is intrinsically good, a goodness that is not written down anywhere but simply known.

The early churches were formed to bring us to this enlightened state, but somewhere along the way they became hung up on ritual and power. Non-affiliated mystics continue to seek the core experience, yet cautioned all the while by the orthodox priesthood, also by the robustly irreligious and the scientistic, that when we stop believing in God, we start believing in anything. But this is not true. We set aside belief and seek instead our own direct experience of the transcendent dimension, the soul life. In a mental health context, the quest for healing, for happiness, for wholeness, is always, in part, a spiritual quest – it’s just that our search is more desperate.

The spiritual vessel is the one most easily damaged by the turbulence of our collective existential angst and it is existential matters that are central to feelings of wholeness, and by implication also their antithesis: depression and anxiety. Topping that vessel up will restore us to ourselves like no other medicine, but first we must divine the shape of the vessel within us, then set it upright. Many succeed in this through the prodigals’ return to the churches they rejected in the long ago, but to the isolated, the disconnected and the lonely in spirit, traditional congregations can be sources of stress, the liturgies triggers for uncomprehending anxiety.

Yet the spiritual function demands its fill whether we are religious or not. It contains the unwritten codex, the contract of our time on earth, and we are obliged to make our peace with it, to move in the direction it is suggesting, both as individuals, and collectively as a species. It would be a lot simpler if all of this was written down for us at birth, perhaps tattooed on our palms, but it isn’t. We have to divine the meaning for ourselves – that is our purpose and we do it by developing a personal relationship with “God”, or whatever label you want to attach to this sense of something “other”.

It sounds arrogant, putting oneself above two thousand years of religious teaching, but we have no choice in it. Just because one finds no connection through conventional worship, it does not stop the stirrings of the spiritual function, so we turn instead to the incoming tide of personal-development literature. This is as eclectic as the varieties of spiritual experience, but it is not easily dismissed. Broadly it suggests we work towards mindful self analysis, seek the stillness within us, and if we need a story to describe it, then a personal mythology will suffice – it does not need to be true for anyone else so long as it sits comfortably with us.

Over the course of a couple of million words, and several strange novels, this is the direction I am moving in. Other researches, online musings, and occasional dialogues with a book from China’s mythic past, enable me to keep my own vessel pointing the right way up, and the water in it just warm enough to relax into now and then. You can do this too. I don’t know how, and hesitate to suggest anything other than that by finding the vessel inside of you, the spiritual function will begin to work its way through you too of its own accord. Then you simply follow wherever it leads.

I hesitate to tell you that, if my own history is anything to go by, none of this will stop that black dog from settling in from time to time. That’s just its nature. Mental illness will always cast a shadow over the lives of those who have even once suffered from it. But through an awareness of simple self-healing – physical, mental and spiritual – we need not feel quite so helpless as we were before. We know we can always beat a path back to the light of life whenever we find ourselves benighted.

I’ll leave the subject of men’s mental health there.

Thanks for listening.

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Men’s Mental Health: Gandalf’s advice? Meditate.

Back in 1977, when I was training in an engineering workshop, my mate ran his finger up a bandsaw blade. He swore and I fainted. I told everyone I’d had no breakfast and maybe that was why I’d fainted -only admitting the truth to the work’s doc. He was an old guy, long steely grey hair, an incongruous hippy type – a real-life Gandalf. He said I’d be okay, told me to get back on that bandsaw right away, and that I’d probably benefit from learning how to meditate.

The advice about the bandsaw made sense, but I ignored the bit about meditation because I had a fairly rational head in those days. When I think back it was probably the most sage piece of advice I’ve ever had from a medical professional. It was to be years later though, dropping a bottle of Prozac into the bin and wondering what the hell I was going to do next, that I finally took his advice.

By then I was struggling with panic attacks. You sit in a cinema, a theatre, a lecture at college, a presentation at work, and you sweat, you shake inside, you fear losing yourself, you fear drawing attention to yourself. You also fear getting cornered by the consummate bore and being too polite to tell him you’re busy, so you sit there, quietly tearing yourself apart while his interminable tale drones on, when what you really want to do is stick your finger in his eye and run away screaming – all of this behind a serene smile.

Scary, isn’t it?

I lasted a couple of weeks on the Prozac. Its effects were dramatic. They calmed me for a while, helped me to keep working, but I was not myself, and this intruder who was not myself took over my self, decided it no longer needed to sleep, that it was okay to do pushups in the small-hours of a workday morning, then decided it was in the mother of all panics and hanging on by its fingernails, needed a doctor more urgently than it had ever done before. This was definitely not me, so the Prozac went in the bin. (don’t do this without talking to your doctor)

So I talked to my doctor, but found him time-pressed and unsympathetic. He told me the medication would either help or it wouldn’t. Well, it wouldn’t. The message was clear: I was on my own; mental health issues may be ruining your life, but unless you’re thinking of taking your life, the amount of support you can expect is patchy. This was 1992. The only difference now is demand is even greater for fewer resources, and we are better at pretending they are not.

Gandalf’s advice finally broke through: I bought a book on Yoga, which introduced me to meditation. Meditation looks complicated, sounds mysterious, and seems bound up with a lot of transcendental, spiritual stuff. But the physical practice itself is straight forward, and it worked. I’ll probably still faint at the sight of a bloody injury, so don’t come looking to me for first aid, but the panic attacks are a thing of the past. I lead a fairly normal life, most of the time.

You don’t need a guru to learn meditation. Even self taught from books, meditation has an immediate effect on the mind, but without “messing” with your mind in the way anti-depressant medication does. In meditation we try not to think , or we try at least to separate ourselves from our thoughts, and to realise we are not our thoughts.

With a panic attack, we think we’re going to faint, when there’s no physical reason why we should – the pulse rate goes up, we hyperventilate, we experience dizziness; with obsessive hypochondria we think we have a fatal illness which we assemble from otherwise innocuous symptoms and we convince ourselves we are going to die; with obsessive behaviours we think we must carry out an action in a particular way or a set number of times and we think that failure to do so will cause something bad to happen. Thinking, especially faulty thinking, has lot to answer for. It can make us really ill. It can ruin our lives.

Meditation was developed to correct faulty thinking, admittedly more on the transcendental, spiritual level, and therein lies the problem for many in the west, and for two reasons: in the west most of us have either cut the spiritual dimension entirely from our lives, drained the vessel dry so to speak, or we have adopted a narrow, entrenched religious view that does not encompass spiritual philosophies borrowed from other cultures; we have filled the vessel instead with concrete, one that does not permit the natural convective dynamics of exploration and change.

So let me defend meditation by saying it acts upon the mental life, and we need not attach any spiritual significance to it at all. It’s just that in eastern cultures there is less separation between the mental and the spiritual realms. Meditation also acts upon the physical body by freeing up energy consumed in vast quantities by a frantically thinking brain. This is why, when we meditate regularly, we feel less drained by life.

You can find “how to” material on meditation just about anywhere online for free, including my own notes, here. We must meditate every day for it to have any meaningful effect, and we’ll most likely feel resistance to this notion when the pain inside us realises what we’re up to, but persistence pays. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of encountering what was once a sure-fire trigger-situation, and realising we’re looking it calmly and squarely in the eye, unshaken.

And just in case you’re a tough guy who thinks meditation is for girls, remember Kung Fu fighters meditate. It gives them an edge. It’ll give you an edge too.

Think about it. Or rather don’t think!

Meditate!

Thanks Gandalf.

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M is for Movember and Men’s Mental Health

It’s Movember again and men all over the world are growing facial hair in order to draw attention to mens’ health issues. In years past the heroic Mo Bros* have focused on raising awareness of our vulnerability to prostate and testicular cancer. But by far the biggest risk to men’s lives comes from another problem and it’s simply this:

If you’re a man you’re more likely to kill yourself than if you’re a woman. In the UK, in 2012, 5891 people are recorded as having taken their own lives, of whom 75% were men. Suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 35 in the UK, though you’re actually more likely to take your life if you’re a man in the 35 to 50 bracket – it’s just that the other major killer, coronary heart disease, begins to catch up the older we get, so skewing the statistic a bit.

What’s curious is that women are far more likely to report suicidal feelings to a friend or a counsellor. They are also more likely to attempt suicide than men. That women are less successful in killing themselves is explained by methodology, which shows distinct gender differences. Women tend to favour overdosing, which has a higher chance of medical intervention than say hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, or gunshot – all methods which males tend to favour.

That more women than men should feel the need to take their own lives is of course an issue society needs to explain, but since this is November, and I’m writing as a man, what I’ll be focusing on is the fact that men are more likely to die by their own hand, and less likely to talk about it before they do – that in short we are more likely to become fatalities in the mental health stakes, than women.

It’s an unfortunate fact in Western society that men are not allowed to be depressed, to suffer from anxiety, let alone any of the more debilitating forms of mental illness like Bi Polar or Schizophrenia. We must simply man up and get on with the job. There is a belief among men that the mental health label is the kiss of death to one’s career, to say nothing of one’s social standing and what one must never do under any circumstances is talk about it to anyone, or even admit it to one’s self. And to be fair it probably is the kiss of death to all those things, so a man is wise to be circumspect in what he admits to. What he should perhaps be asking himself is whether where he is is where he really ought to be, but he never will – at least not until it’s too late.

Twenty years ago, phoning in sick to my boss, did I tell him I was having trouble adjusting to medication for work related stress and anxiety? No, I said I had the flu. Did I cry off a business trip, saying that for weeks beforehand I’d been feeling depressed? No, I said I had the flu. On those occasions, when I couldn’t make it to work because I was so neurotic I couldn’t drive the car on the motorway without feelings of vertigo and nausea, did I tell the boss the way my job was going had affected my mental health? No, I said I had the flu.

If any of this sounds familiar then you’re a man suffering in silence and while you may not yet be suicidal, you’re suffering more than you should be and purely on account of your gender and what you perceive as your role in society. Young men with mental health problems are picked on appallingly by other males, so if they want to fit in they must quickly fashion for themselves a mask of iron. It works for a while. Yes, in the short term it’s possible to pretend you’re as “normal” as the next guy, but mental health issues do not respond well to suppression. They gather energy, they split, morph, proliferate and come back at you ten fold, and in ways you had not imagined possible. Mental health issues need exploring, they need dealing with in the broad light of day if we are to have any hope of dissolving them.

Unfortunately mental health services are powerless to intervene at the fledgling stages of a man’s descent into mental hell if he doesn’t admit there’s a problem, and that he can no longer handle it alone. They tend only to pick up on the cases where an individual has seriously ceased to function, by which time it’s much harder to affect any real change and to turn a life around.

My own midnight of the soul came in the nineties on the downhill run to forty, a time when G.P’s were handing out Prozac like it was the answer to everything. It wasn’t. Public mental health services back then were next to useless. It’s no different now. They try hard, but they’re overwhelmed, underfunded and understaffed. I was lucky in that I’d not reached the stage where my thoughts were turning to the ultimate solution. I was, however, in a very bumpy, uncertain and unhappy place. Fortunately I still had it in me to fight for a way through to a better outlook, but I had to fight clever.

I hope to write more on the issue of mens’ mental health over the coming weeks of Movember, looking at my own path to a more stable footing in life, and what it is about society that may be causing this epidemic of mental illness. Where I am now is that my employment record shows I’m less prone to getting the flu than I was. What it does not show is that I have ever had any mental health issues, which I most certainly do. The fact that I should have been afraid to have myself written up that way is a big part of the problem, it’s also why I shall be growing as big a moustache and beard as I can over the next four weeks, to remind myself of darker times, and hopefully through my writings on the subject make others consider the possibility there could be more behind a man’s manly demeanour than meets the eye.

Mental health is a real killer. So is silence,..

So find someone and talk about it.

*I’m not a real Mo Bro; beards are banned – only moustaches qualify. But that’s okay, I was never much of a joiner anyway and shall wear my goatee with pride.

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