There's something going on with our men, our boys....

For the second time in a month I have now watched a devastated mother bury a son. These men were not old – they were at the point of full-stride in their life. They were both once full of promise and had that room-filling energy and charisma that the very few are touched with, often so early in life. But they died very different men: alone and tormented – the victims of an insidious enemy that comes from the darkness within and drags them down from view. Their mothers were beyond words in their despair. I watched scenes of the ordinary tragedy of life, cast in extraordinary circumstances of unbearable pain.

These men were not soldiers, although we grieved for two more of them last week as well. The similarity is that the battles of these men were with enemies every bit as treacherous and fugitive as an unseen terrorist, and every bit as deadly.

Depression, anxiety and the self-harm or self-neglect that attends these conditions are still more prevalent among women than men. But the common experience of many Australian families, and the cold reality according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is that men are increasingly prone to these conditions, with dangerous, often-fatal consequences. Men are much less likely to talk about their problems or to seek help, and in the past 30 years the suicide rate for males aged 15 to 24 years has tripled.

One of the most alarming conclusions is that a single man is at much higher risk of developing these conditions and of an early death. Both the men whose funerals I attended were no longer in a relationship.

There is something going on with our men, with our boys. The talk at schools, in the HR department at work, in the media is all “feelings this” and “Beyond Blue that”, but for so many men that’s just a lot of rarefied bullshit that can’t really be trusted, and that won’t be of any use to quell the rising wave of panic they feel.

When a man is drowning, the last thing he will do is tell you, and that’s a dangerous silence. Instead, again according to the ABS, a man will commonly take refuge in alcohol or drugs, and that self-medication will often lead to the conditions that end a man’s life prematurely.

The highly articulate nature of women is always such a help to the process of sorting through and coming to terms with life’s pitfalls and disappointments. But there also seems to be a resilience – is it chromosomal? – that allows so many of us to push on.

It is learnt early that a storm of emotions can flood through a woman at many stages of her life, and somehow we come to understand that this is normal and that it will pass and it will come again and we will cope. But get a boy child beyond the tantrum years, and I fear that this “storm” somehow becomes gendered – that it’s what a girl feels, not a boy. The emotionally buffeted young bloke learns to ignore, suppress, fear these experiences, and the techniques for learning to cope with it are simply never taught and never learnt?

We would be wise to learn all that we can about male health, mental and physical, and to encourage in boys as early as we can an ability to identify and to articulate the storms that might rage within.

My family knows from bitter experience that no one can be “saved” from themselves, or from that abyss if they are truly headed that way; but maybe the path that leads to such an end can be avoided if the state of quiet desperation that so many men feel is simply their lot, is instead identified as a pain that they just don’t have to live with any more.

Can we get men to talk about mental illness? How? Do you have a story?

If you or a friend or family member are suffering from depression please call Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

This article originally appeared on The Weekly Review.