There is no "Male Mental Health Crisis"

There is a "Mental Health Crisis". But there is no "Male Mental Health Crisis".

It has always been a popular MRA talking point that men commit suicide at a far greater rate than women. I was always a bit irked by this, as suicide is a catastrophic moral failure in my eyes. Well, not necessarily. Those who commit suicide in order to avoid further dishonor, including those who commit suicide as an act of repentance, are perhaps not just morally neutral but virtuous as to commit suicide while still valuing life requires a lot of bravery and willpower.

For example, the Anti-Hitlerites use the suicide of Adolf Hitler as a sign of his “cowardice”, but it’s the exact opposite. Hitler’s suicide was committed not long before the Soviets got to his bunker, so that his men had enough time to cremate his corpse. He had seen the humiliation that came to Mussolini after death — strung up in the streets like a pig and beaten. Today, despite Mussolini’s demise being something entirely drawn up by Communist Partisans, the event has come to deeply damage Mussolini’s reputation and create an imaginary Italian common people who unilaterally despised Mussolini. We saw a similar series of events play out much more recently with the torture and mutilation of Gaddafi, who was sodomized with a bayonet on live video. We have seen it countless times in history, where the head of an old despot was paraded in the streets. For Hitler, who had fallen into a sort of ecstatic union with the German collective unconscious, his corpse being paraded around in the streets would be one-hundred times more devastating to the German people. Not much better would be Hitler being taken into custody and forced to show up at the kangaroo court known as the Nuremburg Trials. Despite a great deal of evidence that Hitler actually did escape Germany, I think that the idea that he committed suicide in his bunker is more romantic and virtuous than the idea that he escaped and spent the rest of his days brooding in some Latin American shithole.

In this sense, suicide is more of a sacrifice than an act of selfishness. Some Stoics believed that those who find themselves unable to live a virtuous life have an apt reason to commit suicide. I haven’t made up my mind on what I think about this yet.

Today, however, most people commit suicide for indefensible reasons. It is because they have come to shirk their own life, and generally it is over something stupid like a break-up. I understand this only if your lover dies, as an act of devotion to them. Not if they break up with you or “divorce” you. For example, I think Indian women who jumped on their men’s funeral pyres were actually virtuous before it became such a socially enforced norm that they had a cavalcade of ulterior motives.

To commit suicide is arguably much worse than to murder a stranger, especially if you believe in “localistic virtue ethics”, in which case it is pretty much the most severe form of fratricide. You are killing the person closest to you — that is, yourself. Suicide is bad for other reasons though. Dante gives suiciders a very special punishment in hell, although not the most severe. They are turned into thorny trees that are scratched by Harpies day by day, but most interestingly is that they don’t get their bodies back during the final judgement. Because they have killed their own bodies, they have rejected them. They have shirked life, which with all its joys and pains is still a gift. Furthermore, they have attempted to play God and escape the pain of life through insincere means. And because they have shirked their life they are also shirking their duty in life, disrupting Dharma. And of course, not to mention the people they leave behind in life.

But I digress…

Anyways, suicide is mostly committed for dumb reasons by mentally ill people. I have known people online who have committed suicide, although they often had better reasons to do it than most. I pity them, and I wish they were still here, but I can’t view them as a victim. On the other hand, some people I have come to know almost seem like they would be better off dead, but would never have the guts to do something like commit suicide. Which is where I get back to my main point. That is, suicide is not linearly correlated with sadness. Certain people will live in extreme sorrow their whole lives, but are either too scared to commit suicide or simply aren’t impulsive and crazy enough. Or, they have responsibilities. Others have substances to keep them from suicide. I suspect that many drug overdoses are actually suicides, and even those that aren’t intentional suicides are done by people who do drugs out of a suicidal mindset. They have lost the will to live, but still crave the nectar of pleasure. To drug yourself slowly to death is perhaps far worse than suicide because at least the suicider bravely faces his or her own death. They don’t play this stupid pretend game of pleasure-seeking for as long as it doesn’t kill them.

Although men commit suicide at a far higher rate than women, women attempt suicide at a far higher rate than men. The reason they fail more often has to do both with hesitance, and with opting for less effective methods. Some say that it’s because women don’t want people to be traumatized by finding their head blown off. I think that’s kind of stupid, I mean finding a body is already pretty traumatic in the first place and suiciders don’t seem to think anyone cares about them. The more likely reason is that women are more risk-averse and often only commit suicide as a cry for help. Women are also diagnosed with clinical depression around twice as much as men, and this is surprisingly robust. The gap does not wane significantly in countries with higher development or more gender equality, suggesting that it isn’t simply a bias in who is going and getting diagnosed. Furthermore, that isn’t simply a result of “the patriarchy”. This is not terribly surprising, women seem to be generally higher in neuroticism. They feel negative emotions more strongly. Furthermore, the long-term reliance on antidepressants is a strongly female (particularly white female) phenomenon.

Wow.

You would think that women would be happier given so much antidepressant use. Well, you’d think marriages would be happier given so much of the bad ones that get divorced, but neither of these are true. From the looks of it, women are actually experiencing much more negative emotions than men in this day and age and possibly for all of human history. This is in spite of a very real epidemics of male loneliness, male homelessness, male substance abuse, and male underachievement.

While this may seem like a trend of both sexes, it’s important to recognize that women are the one willfully driving this trend. There is a statistic somewhere comparing the percent of men and women who “want to have sex but have not had it [in some timeframe]” which demonstrates this, but unfortunately I’m having a hard time finding it. I’ll add it to this article if I ever find it again. If any of you have it on you, DM me. But, even without the statistic, this is pretty intuitive. Men want sex but are having a harder time getting it than ever due to the ascendancy of extremely lopsided online dating markets.

Alongside, of course, the issue of rising female status, which I talk about in this post:

As far as male homelessness and substance abuse go, it’s pretty well documented and not controversial. Male underachievement has to do with higher education becoming increasingly female-dominated, albeit there is a certain level at which women become underrepresented again due to women picking stupid majors and not going to grad school so they could become some “group management resource fulfillment specialist” at Google. But, men usually occupy the extremes of society. That’s also probably a reason why men have higher suicide rates. More women might be a bit sad but more men are just total useless fuckups. Men just have more variation in general because men tend to drive evolution. The flipside is that men generate much more exceptional people as well. In fact, it is a big problem that women are “winning” academia and corporate America today because of this. Women are able to get by much more today because we select much more for agreeableness, conscientiousness and high socialization, not merit. Women aren’t even necessarily social butterflies, but they have a halo effect of sorts which leads to the perception that they are. Men not only produce more highly talented people but are also less consensus-driven, leading to more novel ideas.

Anyways, it’s very important that we dispel this myth of “men are mentally disturbed” because our enemies are learning to use it against us. Most times I see it now, it is used to prove that “toxic masculinity” harms men too, or as some sort of “pwn” against men by those dastardly creatures whose genitalia are unpleasantly proximal to their anuses. Keep in mind, a lot of the MRA types are basically feminists as well in this regard and think traditional gender norms are bad. You know, “men commit suicide because they bottle it up until it’s too much and they blow their head off”. In reality, men only blow their head off at higher rates than women because they have the willpower to do so, not because they are more miserable (all evidence points to the opposite). Psychotherapy is the religion of contemporary America, and it is much more faith-based than Christianity or Judaism or Islam. The positive effects of therapy are heavily inflated by flawed methodology, publication bias, and placebo, and Psychoanalysis is widely considered to be a pseudoscience by modern Psychologists. As they discuss in the article, therapists are potentially no better at resolving people’s issues than a priest is to a devout Catholic, or a shamanic oracle is to one of his tribesmen. The effectiveness of antidepressants is also flimsy, and the question of whether or not someone should choose to live on antidepressants for their entire lives is a long one. I would say, no. That’s no way of living. Some people really need them, because they are mental cases, and I can only say I pity them (and it is not a good thing to be pitied). But most people don’t and have essentially sold their ability to be happy directly to some company. You can’t just take them once in a while, like Tylenol or something. If you miss a few days, you have an “episode”. A spell of panic and melancholy. I’ve seen it play out before my very eyes. What would such people do if they for any reason were cut off access to these pills? This reliance on substances, it’s just humiliating. It’s a sign of weakness.

But to the “pro-crying” crowd, humiliation is the golden nectar of the gods. Having pride and a sense of personal dignity beyond “I’m unique” is seen as an indicator of repression, the root of trauma, because it encourages a certain kind of emotional rigidity. Certain things must be met stoically, while other things cannot be ignored. It’s not about the consequences, it’s about the correct choice of action. But the motto of the new crowd is more like, “Nothing matters, so you should act however you want, as long as you’re a decent fucking human being and not a bigxt!” and such and such. And so now we’re left with people who conveniently ignore the actual shitty social conditions men put up with for this geist of “toxic masculinity” which men are not living in fear of, but derive meaning from. And the justification for this is based on extremely misleading data. The solution? Well, to the “trads” (who 100% believe in toxic masculinity, but call it by different names) it is to stop playing video games, stop fapping, and most importantly to marry a 31 year old overweight girl from the Renaissance fair. Combined with the sole social reform of making urban architecture beautiful, this will surely solve all of our problems! To the ordinary feminists, it is to encourage men to be more emotional, embrace their feminine side, and open up more often. Of course, these men will often be rewarded with the sexual repulsion of the women who encouraged him to do this in the first place, but that’s his fault somehow.