Many of my childhood friends are dead. Is masculinity to blame? | World news

I'm not sure where the author is getting these stories. I grew up in Kamloops and suicide was very rare and certainly not any more prevalent than the utopian paradise of Vancouver. Vancouver is a town of unhappy people and is known for its rampant drug abuse. Of course this is all kept carefully hidden, but as soon as you scratch the surface you see a city of extreme poverty and inequality. It is a town for the rich that masquerades as a town full of opportunity. Of course people that go there find this out first hand when they realize they will need 6 figure incomes just to survive.

Recently we are seeing a rapid migration of older people from the lower mainland retiring to the BC interior as they realize that life ain't so grand anymore and they can sell their million dollar homes and retire to the Okanagan to live like kings. Who wants to sit in traffic for 2 hours a day? Who has the money to purchase a million dollar teardown? The future of Vancouver is ever more inequality as the rich parade around in BMW's and the poor serve them Starbucks. The future of Vancouver is young people not getting married or having children because they can't afford it. The future of Vancouver is despair.

No question that there’s a problem to be addressed here, but I think we need to start rolling back the stigma around masculinity in much the same way we need to roll back the stigma around mental health. Men aren’t struggling because men are flawed, they are struggling in the 21st century because the 21st is designed (we designed the world this way, whether we intended to or not) to be horrible for men. Women aren’t unscathed by the woes of the modern era either. It’s become increasingly clear over the past few years that research on men’s mental health is way behind, many treatments that are effective for women may even be negative for men, so treating them exactly the same can make the problems worse. Personally, I think the aversion of men to “talking about their feelings” is perfectly rational. There is a cultural component, yes, but most research points to men requiring high levels of trust and deep friendships to share things like that. Men develop friendships differently than women to begin with and we are living in an isolation epidemic to boot.

Get off the net. Go lift/throw a ball/join a martial art. Find someplace where only the people you want to associate with socialize, ditch the people you cant stand. Go for walks and talk with people. Stop getting swept into retail therapy. That "man depression" is just the male brain's declining momentum, kick it in the ass and see how much more drive there will be. We've been brainwashed to follow the same avenues for help as our mothers, sisters and partners, out of concern for our emotional well being, but the difference is we need to live in the physical, not the emotional. Love your life. Don't think about living it.