It's great when you're straight

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Sounds like there's been a mutual misunderstanding because c_c only said he doesn't think patriarchal attitudes have that big an effect in the male suicide phenomenon or in the present mismanagement of the NHS, and not - as you said - that it's "a thing of that past" in general.

A mutual misunderstanding, huh? Well, maybe...
 

cwmbran-city

Well-known member
cwmbran, are you saying that men are just naturally more inclined to commit suicide than women? Like, there's a male-suicide gene or something? It's just you seem keen on pointing out that men commit suicide more than women, yet the possible causes you suggest (overwork, stress, economic inequality) affect women more than men.

its clear what i'm saying, read between the lines & then all will "seem" as it should be, seem?

there's enough there for you to excavate thru, if you can be arsed, or you could spend a small portion of your day googling around various sources who will all unreservedly confirm the same thing......that death by suicide is in the majority of case samples reviewed indicative of a male demographic around a certain age bracket

if you'd like it spelled for you, i'd check Luka's point about race to the infested chancre sore pit of capitalism, compounded by a health service unfit for purpose

fkn genes? come come Sir, you're better than that


i think it's glib because, well, imagine someone coming to you, well Benny I actually want to end it all I'm sufffering so much in this world i can no longer bear it nad i don't understand, it's all beyond my capacity to understand, i can't take it any more

and you go

oh yeah right. that's just patriarchy mate.

it's just maybe not that helpful


exactly

patriarchy is the latest buzz word of an increasingly angry left-wing agitation group who misrepresent key social problems by blanketing them with this catch-all terminology

it doesnt get to the core of this specific issue & serves to misrepresent already muddy waters....the fact its spouted by someone who works in directing funding for new innovative therapeutic research methods is mind boggling

patriarchy?

ffs

if you work on as many cases of medical negligence & have to pick up the pieces of as much professional incompetence & mess as i do, the bigger picture would start to seep thru, but until people turn for help with their mental health society as a whole has no idea just how fragmented Britain's mental health services really are

so, if someone, anyone, male or female, goes to their GP and says, as above "i'm thinking of ending it all Dr Benny", chances are that GP will dose them with an inadequate anti-depressant, delay referral to a CMHT because of waiting lists, which may just be the start of said patient's problems, and from there suicide risks become elevated, because theres a galaxy sized gap between what a GP can or will do & being sectioned.....that is the real abyss & until you're forced to navigate it nothing else compares

capitalism is the main culprit, vast swathes of post-industrial service sector industries, people looking for help from a heath service that simply doesnt want to know (as an institution)

parenthesis - some of society's purest form of angels work in the health sector & there are angels in CMHT's, but they are leaving the service at record levels due to stress, because of structural incapacity, because of a management culture that preaches "do more with less and delay, delay, delay, just look at the waiting lists...." & now the capstone of Brexit

if anyone here wants to help or raise their levels of understanding, try volunteering for 1hr a week at your local MIND and record what you see

only empathy can generate real understanding & i see little of that here
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
if you'd like it spelled for you, i'd check Luka's point about race to the infested chancre sore pit of capitalism,

Actually it was bboon who said this, so who are you beefing with exactly? You're the one who's going off on one without reading what other people are saying properly
 

cwmbran-city

Well-known member
to imply with comedic tongue in cheek irony or whether your motivation to drop a genetic misnomer in was to rile, thats what i was replying to, hence the repetition.

if that riles you, address it like an adult, because its an adult subject & its just possible, just, that other people commenting know what they're talking about.

if you work on the frontline in mental health, respect, if you dont & throw genetic bs into such a discussion followed by ridiculing someone, dont expect to be taken seriously as an adult on this specific subject subsequently.

over to you Dr B.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
im not proposing we throw it in the bin. just pointing out the problem with these grand, big picture, diagnostic words. capitalism is another good one. there's a tendency for their definitions (always vague and ill-defined at the best of times) to elide into 'everything' or 'the way things are'


Reserve army of labour, surplus value and impersonal domination by the commodity form can explain a lot though re a political economy of mh. and social reproduction can help in the understanding of how patriarchy is able to sustain itself — to decouple the two is wrongheaded tho ime.

But for most people leftists included, capitalism is either an antipathy to consumerist culture or dissatisfaction with management rather than a set of social relations.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
to imply with comedic tongue in cheek irony or whether your motivation to drop a genetic misnomer in was to rile, thats what i was replying to, hence the repetition.

if that riles you, address it like an adult, because its an adult subject & its just possible, just, that other people commenting know what they're talking about.

if you work on the frontline in mental health, respect, if you dont & throw genetic bs into such a discussion followed by ridiculing someone, dont expect to be taken seriously as an adult on this specific subject subsequently.

over to you Dr B.

I didn't ask you intending to rile, and I'm not riled. Slightly exasperated maybe.

Lots of people do have biological determinist assumptions, so I guess it's good to know that you think the genetic thing is bs. However, if you read what I said, your explanations regartding lack of funding, interest, capitalism et etc are all well and good, nobody was disputing them, but they don't explain the disparity between male and female suicide numbers. Baboon offered some good ideas as to why that might be (and shone a light on some important contributing factors to poor mental health in general) and you couldn't have been more dismissive.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Lol this thread has been well and truly derailed. I was responding initially to this comment by Cwmbran, who was the person who introduced 'patriarchy' into this discussion (I never mentioned the word except in quoting him), but now seems to have completely forgotten this and is railing against its use!:

"Suicide by men under 50 is now 1 of the leading causes of death for this demographic. If it was any other form of disease or disorder, it would be treated like an international crisis. But because of the all pervasive Guardian-obsessed "patriarchy" & the fact most men are disposable workhorses in the labour market, nothing is done."

It's very well established that men are considerably less likely to seek help from mental health services (look it up). This was then distorted as suggesting that I was appealing to some kind of natural 'gender traits', whereas my point was the opposite - that gender is socialised, and therefore the traits associated with it are only contingent and can be changed. By men.

I never said - obviously - that there aren't many other factors that contribute towards high incidences of male suicide. But in invoking male suicide in the first place as a special case, we are talking about the differences between men and women, and not about factors that equally affect them, such as a broken mental health system.

Tea, genuinely good to see you back here! (but please read what I actually said)
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
so, if someone, anyone, male or female, goes to their GP and says, as above "i'm thinking of ending it all Dr Benny", chances are that GP will dose them with an inadequate anti-depressant, delay referral to a CMHT because of waiting lists, which may just be the start of said patient's problems, and from there suicide risks become elevated, because theres a galaxy sized gap between what a GP can or will do & being sectioned.....that is the real abyss & until you're forced to navigate it nothing else compares

capitalism is the main culprit, vast swathes of post-industrial service sector industries, people looking for help from a heath service that simply doesnt want to know (as an institution)

and as I've pointed out to you before - and been rebuffed for the purposes of continuing an argument - we agree on a lot of things, such as the above. Obviously so because we've both had experience of the same screwed-up system.

You hit it on the head there - 'male or female' - the system treats both badly. So we have to look elsewhere to see why men are killing themselves at a greater rate than women.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Capitalism has become synonym with unbridled capitalism. Capitalism and strong, effective social programs are by no means mutually exclusive.
 

luka

Well-known member
Lol this thread has been well and truly derailed.

yeah ultimately the thread was just for me to boast about how much weight ive lost and act all self-righteous but never mind

Snickers4ever
5h ago
76 77

I have tried to write this several times but it keeps coming out wrong so forgive me if it sounds bad.

But I am sick of the 'Black' or 'female' issues being rammed down my throat. It feels like an attempt to make me and other white men feel guilty about ...something...Racism, sexism, wage disparity....when the vast majority of us are nothing of the sort. I refuse to be made to feel like some sort of creep or racist.

I see only a Marvel film here. However I think in its attempt to 'be black' it has gone too far the other way and seems exclusively black down to the romanticized view of an African country and with faux 'African' accents (which is just insulting to everyone).
I also had an issue with (in comprehensively) Oscar nominated film Get Out where the whole White people exploiting Black people seemed shoe-horned in with no actual relevance to the over-all story - unless it was being racist against white people.

I'm sorry but all of these labels and separation do nothing to further the cause of racial harmony. All it does is further divide people and this article and many other like it don't help one jot.

As I said, all I see is a Marvel film here and I'd like to hope that it wouldn't further the seemingly increasing divide between people. But I think it has and will.
 

luka

Well-known member
ProbablyOnTopic MattB242
5h ago
20 21

It's funny that you're criticising my reading skills, as you apparently didn't read my post that you replied to originally.

Again, then: I have never heard a non-white person use the term in the flesh. It seems to be the preserve of painfully right-on journalists and social media commenters. You're not asking me to respect non-white people's wishes, you're asking me to respect your wishes.

And I won't, because it's homogenising. It suggests that all non-white people fit into a natural category other than 'human beings'. Just like 'ethnic' and 'coloured'. I won't use a term that implies there's something special about being white.
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Mark Tyler MattB242
5h ago
10 11

I would refer you to Jordan Petersons take on enforced language. I'm happy to oblige anyone as long as enforced language isn't a necessity.
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Mark Tyler MattB242
5h ago
14 15

My good friends Jag and Devi are Punjabi. They are old school and worked like hell to create the best possible outcomes for their kids They have no doubt received some abuse along the way. My friend Jed is from a Muslim background. My friends Chanel and Basil are black. Not one of them is asking me to change the way that I address them. "Use my pronouns" seems as ridiculous to them as it does to me
.
 

luka

Well-known member
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Mark Tyler MattB242
3h ago
4 5

I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.I have no privelige.

Is that enough? I have no privelige. I'm a poor sod, a single parent and I'm trying to get from month to month. I have no privelige. What somebody elses ancestors did has nothing to do with me.

My ancestors? My mum was too young to be evacuated from the Blitz. I can tell you that Londeners were pretty fu**ed up by that. My dad was evacuated, but had to come home to his neglectful mother. My grandfather was blown off a factory roof whilst on fire watch, and died in hospital of his injuries. On the other side my grandfather was blinded in an accident and died young because of neglect. My grandmother lost all of her family in Polish death camps.

What privelige
?
 

cwmbran-city

Well-known member
life is too short to have to sift thru past posts just to clarify a specific point, but here it is, i'm not repeating the process because a couple of you appear to take more delight in poking fun @ de-legitimizing someone else's point of view by claiming they're the culprit at derailing discussion & confusing the issue, when they should be looking closer to home...

soooo, heads up heathens, here it is, zero memes included:

Suicide by men under 50 is now 1 of the leading causes of death for this demographic. If it was any other form of disease or disorder, it would be treated like an international crisis. But because of the all pervasive Guardian-obsessed "patriarchy" & the fact most men are disposable workhorses in the labour market, nothing is done.

the context for patriarchy was posited as the reason why certain national press agencies continue to ignore a vast national public health crisis of ungodly proportions, if all this attention is on the latest Weinstein, Spacey, *insert celebrity sex predator here scandal, ie: that men are the root of all society's ills, when right under their noses thousands of preventable male deaths are occurring week week out, then the subject is never going to attain the degree of analysis it deserves to reverse problem.

no wonder then that the general public, society, our health care system & our political representatives continue to ignore the problem, when the gulf between left wing & right wing ideological polarities has never appeared so high.

all of us need to find some form of consensus on the matter in hand, to meet each other on some form of public platform to try to understand the problem in its fullest context, because only then can anything change.

do we see this discussion anywhere in the media, via NHS professionals or via our political representatives?

do we fk, because the Tory hordes want to partially dismantle & privatize the NHS on ideological grounds as best it can and the opposite side is fixated on patriarchy as the root of all evil.


really, the undoubted male suicide crisis has nothing to do with ignoring this crisis to focus instead on patriarchal attitudes. It's almost the opposite - the continued fixation from men on maintaining fixed gender roles (which obviously disadvantages women massively; the less appreciated aspect being that men also suffer hugely from a system they in essence created) has to bear much of the responsibility, so that talking about one's feelings = a 'feminine' trait, rather than a human one, and stoicism in the face of any amount of emotional pain continues to be seen as 'male'. Men create this prison for themselves. Until men 'allow' other men to seek help for mental health issues by creating a more open culture of maleness (and not shaming them for it), then men will continue to kill themselves at alarming rates.
.


you managed to take one observation & run with it to another level by taking it completely out of context, thats why my own reply was so derisive.

it reeks of the worst aspects of the current fixation on patriarchy as the definitive cause of societal ills (see the Guardian allusion above), is misinformed, poorly thought through and completely irrelevant & inappropriate when it comes to the modern NHS crisis and your generalization that men are so terrified of shaming themselves that suicide is a better resolution.

this is fundamentally wrong, because it ignores the complexity of causes & effects....which is why this reply conveyed my exacerbation at such a degraded understanding of the matter in hand =

patriarchal attitudes have been far more entrenched in the past, but there arent anywhere near the same the rates of correlation with suicide, not by a huge margin.

equally mental health services have never been so expansive (yet still sketchy as fuck).

yet essentially you're saying rates of male suicide are down to males suppressing emotions, that this is a patriarchal prison, stoically self-made & self-perpetuating = really?

baboon2004
as I've pointed out to you before - and been rebuffed for the purposes of continuing an argument.


rebuffed not for the sake of continuing an argument, more the critical lack of awareness in your own approach in explaining patriarchal roles as one of the main causes of male suicide.... its not rocket science but it is indicative of someone who doesnt have a survivors view of the problem.

by pinpointing why, how & where your position lacked insight, empathy & a fuller understanding of the problem, i'm accused of derailing the thread.

so be it.

its the default option of immature minds to accuse someone of derailing a subject because you dont agree with their criticism of the weaknesses in your own understanding of the subject....a "debate" can not develop if individuals fail to see or engage with the flaws in their own ideological scaffolding.

this is why you've become increasingly defensive & lobbed the derailing euphemism as soon as you encountered a counter-point to your own false logic & to de-legitimize anything i expressed (except very broad consensus that there is a problem, thank the gods), its something i deal with week in/week out with MH services, consultants, SHO's & CPN's, which is why i'm not surprised to see a MH worker spout the "P-word" (sorry i just couldnt type that word out one more time)

whether trying to cut thru the complexities of defining capitalism, its role in creating so much pressure on MH services which cant cope with the demands being placed upon them, through to institutional obfuscation where clinicians serve to preserve their own careers & self-interest over the greater public interest.....thats not just a problem, its a national disgrace because the outcome for patients can be so severe it beggars belief just how endemic the fault-lines are & it isnt going to go away anytime soon.

part of the problem identified from my own advocacy work, is that GP's tend to be more empathetic/sympathetic with women expressing concerns over their mental health than they are with men, if the women concerned are mothers even more so because their anxieties will then generally be higher still & a GP will usually interpret such behaviour as a probable cause & a direct influence on their ability to manage their parenting roles. Younger women, particularly students, who tend to be more agreeable than men, face a greater problem here, but university services are slowly beginning to recognize the problem & every higher education facility now has its own internal counseling service, Cardiff has even started doing EMDR sessions for social anxiety for all sexes & genders, which is making a significant difference to the mental health of students. Once they leave university the problems are then greatly amplified due to state of the current MH sector.

to focus back on the main theme here, men are clearly currently facing some kind of sex-identity crisis, for minor but illuminating proof just look at the number of weight training clones & the range of tattoos & beards currently doing the rounds compared to 20-30yrs ago.....this isnt just fashion, its one area where masculinity can be expressed albeit in a very limited & confined field....equally the weight training/body image aesthetic rarely has little to do with fitness, health or self-defense awareness/capability & is all about image projection in a world where individual agency has never faced more influence from marketing imagery about how a man should look (rather than behave) & institutional bs from a post-post-industrial world. Very very few male gym clones will take up Jujitsu or Krav Maga as a way to purge the mind & improve their health, so the expression of beards, tattoos & muscle bulk are for public display. The question again loops back to why?

No doubt women face an even more aggressive & ageist marketing onslaught about how to look, which can spiral into eating disorders, fat shaming anxiety driven horror, compounded by the corrosive influence of social media (instagram users beware), facebook's habit of falsely framing & validating the multitude of "look at what a happy families &/or individuals we all are, heres 150photos of our last holiday...." etc

If i've repeated myself on the odd occasion in previous posts, it was because repeated misunderstandings were being re-presented, from the P-word to the comment about a male suicide gene....the latter of which i'm not averse to seeing the humour in, but the former :face-palm:

Nonetheless, if we were sat around a pub table, chewing the fat face to face (pork scratchins and a diet coke please!), the communication here would have been clearer & more streamlined, but when folks lob "derailing" terms in to de-legitimize someone else's point of view, that particularly strategy of provocation & making them appear irrelevant aswell as disregarding what their evidence-based experiences are, will get the short shrift deserved.

sorry i couldnt be more brief, a couple of lines for answers usually suffice on forums, but some of the posts here barely justify a response, maybe thats the best policy from now on.

*edit - caught this on the way home in the car last night, highly recommended & very well put together program on an " investigation of how and why individuals and organisations learn from their mistakes or fail to do so. In this episode he explores how government could get better at experimenting and adapting from when things go wrong." (no dload sory)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08xxfz7
 
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