The One Big Taboo Nobody In The World Wants To Talk About
Talking about it can save lives.
Timur Weber | Canva Five years after I was born, my father tried to take his own life. He ended up in a mental hospital and I grew up wondering what happened to my father and if it would happen to me. My mother later married an alpha male powerhouse who conned her into believing he would make everything better in her world but eventually left her and me, alone and sad. I believe our childhood wounds have a great influence on who we become as adults. It’s no accident that I became a psychotherapist and an author with books like The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Aggression and Depression.
Becoming a therapist didn’t guarantee I would magically gain the wisdom to help other people or even be able to help myself have a joyful life. I married right out of college and we had two children. Despite our best efforts, our marriage faltered and ended after ten years. After grieving the ending, I soon fell in love again. I was fearful of another loss but we got married with great hope for the future. That marriage lasted three years. After the end of my second marriage, I became depressed and began suffering from heart irregularities.
After writing another book, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, I vowed I'd figure out what had gone wrong and how I could find real lasting love. I met Carlin and we’ve now been together for 36 wonderful years. I wrote a book about what we learned, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. I feel this is a very hopeful time for men, women, and couples. Simply put: More and more of us are giving up on life. Suicide is becoming a path of relief from pain for millions of people and our national leaders seem to have given up on solving the real problems we face in the world including climate change, violence, ecological destruction, and economic dislocations. They remind me of irritable old men screaming at each other from adjacent deck chairs on the Titanic.
Although violence toward others captures our attention, suicide takes the lives of more people than are killed in all forms of interpersonal violence. "There are more than one million people who die by suicide each year in the world, which is more people than die from war, terrorist attacks, and homicides every year. So more people kill themselves than are killed by other people," says Lanny Berman, Ph.D., president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).
Further, worldwide, males kill themselves 4 times more often than females, and in the U.S. the suicide rate for males is 4 to 18 times higher than it is for females, increasing dramatically with age. When we are sick in body, mind, or spirit, we often turn to our doctors for help and healing. But even our healers are killing themselves in record numbers. Doctor suicides are a part of the larger taboo against confronting our collective loss of hope for a better future. One doctor who refuses to be silent is Pamela Wible, M.D.
"Each year more than one million Americans lose their doctors to suicide," says Dr. Wible, "and nobody ever tells patients the truth, the real reason they can’t see their doctors ever again. Nobody talks about our doctors jumping from hospital rooftops, overdosing in call rooms, hanging themselves in hospital chapels. It’s medicine’s dirty secret and it’s covered up by our hospitals, clinics, and medical schools."
Dr. Wible recently gave a TED-Med talk, "Why Doctors Kill Themselves", and she wrote a moving book, Physician Suicide Letters Answered. Reflecting on her own student experience she said, "No student wants to become a doctor to kill themselves. It’s the ultimate oxymoron: the barefoot shoemaker, the starving chef, the suicidal doctor." Dr. Wible found answers in her own life and decided to change how she practiced medicine, founding her own "Ideal Medical Clinic" and teaching other healthcare practitioners how to do the same. She wanted to understand this ultimate taboo subject.
"So what is going on?" she asked. "Why is the plague of physician and medical student suicide such a secret? Why am I the one piecing this together? I’m a solo family doctor, yet somehow I’ve become an investigative reporter, a specialist in physician suicide. Why? Mostly because I can’t stop asking why. Why did both doctors I dated in med school die by suicide? Why did eight doctors kill themselves just in my sweet little Oregon town?"
Looking back on my life, I realize I could have been one of those doctors. After graduating from college, I was accepted into medical school at UC San Francisco, one of the best medical schools in the country. But what I found when I began school was a world more akin to military boot camp than a healing environment. When I decided to drop out of school and return my full tuition scholarship, I was told I had to see a psychiatrist before I could leave. I was seen as "crazy" for wanting to leave a school most people were dying to get into.
But medical school is just a microcosm of our money-oriented, disconnected, and dysfunctional society. The taboo tells us not to talk about how destructive it all is and how many people are in despair. Another part of the taboo is that we don’t hear stories from people who "drop out", whether it’s dropping out of medical school, dropping out as a doctor, or dropping out of civilization itself and committing to creating a society that works for all people. One of the most radical acts we can engage in is to tell the truth about our dysfunctional world and also to spread the word that there is a better way.
My work with men’s health and gender healing goes back to a book I read in 1976, The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege by Herb Goldberg, Ph.D. "The male has paid a heavy price for his masculine 'privilege' and power," said Goldberg. "He is out of touch with his emotions and his body. He is playing by the rules of the male Game Plan and with a lemming-like purpose he is destroying himself: emotionally, psychologically, and physically." But as Dylan reminds us, "the times are a changing." We can reverse our lemming-like march to destruction and to do that, we need to break the taboo and begin talking about our collective despair as well as the hope for a radically different future.
If you or somebody that you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, there is a way to get help. Call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or text "HELLO" to 741741 to be connected with the Crisis Text Line.
Jed Diamond is a licensed psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in International Health and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. He is the author of The Whole Man Program: Reinvigorating Your Body, Mind, and Spirit.