Guy Wisdom
Even Cowboys Get The Blues
Know when sadness becomes a sickness
By Cristabel Fagela
No one goes through life unscathed. There are events that leave us devastated, unsure and shaken. For experiences where there is a sharp sense of loss felt, usually a period of mourning follows and the most salient emotion is sadness. How long this will be felt depends on many factors like the time interval, the individual’s coping skills, social support network and so on. Some are up and running after a few days while others slowly spiral down into depression.
Now when we talk about depression, we are referring to a spectrum with the ordinary blues at one end, and a full blown case of clinical depression at the other extreme. As they say, a lot of things do not come in black and white—there are a lot of shades of gray in between. And so it is with depression. Since we’ve all been intimate at one time or another with the blues, no discussion is needed on this. You may be wondering though what constitutes a diagnosis of clinical depression. The diagnostician’s bible, DSM IV-TR, presents a criteria for a Major Depressive Episode. »
Having a psychic link with you, dear reader, I can see you shaking your head and asking why the hell are we talking about depression in this magazine? After all, prevailing studies according to sex indicate that in a population, the ratio between females and males in developing depression is 2-is-to-1. So, women are more at risk in developing such a disorder, and I bet you’re thinking that the males who show symptoms are probably sissies anyway. And, being a strong manly representative of your species equips you with immunity, right? Think again.
Looking at the suicide rates, a common trend is that males commit more successful suicides than females. Figures for the Philippines, according to the 1993 data obtained by the World Health Organization (WHO), are roughly 2.5 males to 1.7 females (per 100,000).
Recent research and literature (mostly in the West) have also found out that depression may be as common for males as it is in females. The difference lies in the manifestations of the symptoms. In the book Male Menopause (see “The ‘Pause’ in Males”), author Jed Diamond compared depression in males and females on several points. He reveals that a large part of the “unacceptablity” of depression in men can be attributable to societal and cultural expectations of how a male is supposed to act. Even in this modern age when we think that our consciousness has been raised to regard the sexes equally, remnants of the traditional still persist. To illustrate my point, here’s a sort-of riddle that I often present to my students: A father and a son decided to catch a movie. They boarded their pick-up truck to go to the theatre. On the way there, their truck collided with another vehicle. The father died on the spot and the son’s condition was critical. The son was brought to the emergency room of a nearby hospital and a doctor was called to attend to the case. The doctor arrived, took one look at the patient and exclaimed, “I can’t operate on the patient; that’s my son.”
When I ask my students to explain the scenario to me, most of them get stumped. Their explanations range from the father not knowing that he was already dead (mala-Sixth Sense) to the father having an evil twin brother who was the one who died in the accident (soap operatic). Only a handful of students will get the answer right away: that the doctor was the boy’s mother. So there.
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Men's Health Philippines - October 2005 Issue
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