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.
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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