10 ms·

I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I

I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...

wiseowise 11mo ago
> Too much psychology talk in every day life I'm curious to hear how often do you hear it in every day life outside of the internet.
- tossandthrow 11mo ago
  In all fairness, the internet is for many people a near 100% part of their life. Especially for people working remotely without a family.
  - koakuma-chan 11mo ago
    HN is like 70% of my life.
    - pxc 11mo ago
      I also spend what feels to me like a lot of time here. I like it, despite its problems. But HN isn't good enough to deserve to be 70% of anyone's life. :(
      - koakuma-chan 11mo ago
        I agree, but it's 12:10 PM, and I am in my third meeting, pretending to pay attention. I wish the job market improved.
        pxc 11mo ago
        I feel that. I wish the same.
        Nevermark 11mo ago
        Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine? Oh … never mind. I have always worked remote and been hermitting recently on a difficult set of (work) challenges. I don’t know what I would do without HN. I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
        koakuma-chan 11mo ago
        > Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine? I don't do alcohol, drugs, et cetera, because I saw other people who did, and found them disgusting. I don't want to be like that. Though if I could easily get my hands on a weapon, I would have probably shot myself already. > I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN. There is also lobste.rs
  - lukan 11mo ago
    Well, my nonprofessional opinion about those is, that no amount of therapy can help here, when their problem is isolation and the cure living close to people they like. (But therapy might help them getting there again. True eremits by heart are rare)
- sho_hn 11mo ago
  It definitely does feel like every American I know "has a therapist", sometimes.
  - bear141 11mo ago
    I used to think that therapists were ridiculous. But after having one for six or seven years now, I realize that it’s literally just someone you pay to help you be the happiest and best version of yourself. Maybe everyone doesn’t need that, but I don’t think anyone is inherently always the best version of themselves. What’s the point of not trying to be a little better?
    - saghm 11mo ago
      I feel like the world would be a much better place if literally everyone did have a therapist. Having a neutral, trained professional you talk you for 45 minutes twice a month about things that are tough in your life is not something that should alarm people, but being vehemently against it honestly kind of is...
    - 21asdffdsa12 11mo ago
      The digestion juices of individualistic society?
      - bear141 11mo ago
        Do you mean therapy is designed to teach outcasts how to fit better into the machine? I would agree with that, and while I hate that it is partly true and reject anything like this for myself in general, individual happiness sometimes correlates with greasing your wheels to be a better subject.
    - flatline 11mo ago
      I have been in therapy on and off through most of my life. There are parts of the process and the profession that are helpful. There are also parts that are paternalistic bordering on abusive. “Literally just someone you pay to the be happiest…” is a small part of the picture. I take issue with this view of therapy, and the idea that it is somehow a universal force for good that will benefit everyone. I have met some pretty unhinged therapists - both as a client and socially. I won’t even go into the history of psychiatry and clinical care. One of the questions I like to pose is, what are we doing as a society by sending so many people to therapy? What do these practices do at a large scale? And to all those who decry things like gun violence: if you think our current mental health system would somehow be able to address the larger ills of society if only they had more funding, I have some serious questions about your view of its overarching effectiveness, and the specific effects of these practices.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- walthamstow 11mo ago
  At work, like all the time? Empowerment, values, growth mindset, psychological safety, mindfulness, emotional intelligence...
  - _cenw 11mo ago
    Half of these aren't people talking about mental health problems, but preconditions for mental health. That's your problem?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - walthamstow 11mo ago
      Seems like we both agree that psychological language can be common in everyday offline life, such as at work for a large company. I don't have a problem with it, not sure where you got that from.
      - _cenw 11mo ago
        You're ignoring the subtext of the comment above yours. > Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately... Their problem isn't with the language itself, but how it is handled in public. That point doesn't really translate if you pivot to creating an environment conductive to mental health.
- Fluorescence 11mo ago
  Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves. There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic. There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc. There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc. It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
tossandthrow 11mo ago
This is a valid take. But we need to apply it evenly on the entire society. If we fill up the public discourse with the issues and wants of women and make the issues and wants of men a private matter this will skew the public understanding of the stance of women and men - we see this hardcore these days with boys and men being villainized, made invisible and made suspicious only due to their gender. From here we have two ways forward: Either make sure that mens issues gain a proportionate part of the public discourse or argue that all issues are a private matter.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
  Not the commenter, and I 'm not a fan of how normal it has become to do one's dirty laundry in public. But I find it lamentable that the most popular takeaway from the internet's mainstreaming of feminist thought is that men’s issues are necessarily in competition with women's issues for representation. It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".
  - tossandthrow 11mo ago
    > It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics This statement has more than one issue: 1. First and foremost, it is simply a rewrite of the history. There is a difference between descriptive and substantive representation. And it is true that men have been descriptively better represented. But the thoughtless implication that this leads to better substantive representation is simply wrong. 2. It justifies the idea of "reparations" for previous generations misdoing. Not only does this induce a high level if dissent, it is simply immoral. Even if we would accept reparations, it is still only justified by the rewrite of the history. I appreciate the call for nuance, but I think the historical framing here deserves scrutiny. You're right that men have dominated politicly, but it's worth distinguishing between who held power (descriptive representation) and whose interests were served (substantive representation). Most men throughout history had no political power - they were subjects of monarchies, excluded by property requirements, or conscripted into wars they didn't choose. The men making decisions were a tiny elite. On "women's issues only recently being better represented" -this depends heavily on what we're measuring. If we look at something like life expectancy as a rough proxy for overall life quality (capturing war mortality, occupational deaths, access to resources, healthcare), historical data suggests men and women faced roughly equal burdens pre-industrialization, just distributed differently. Women faced maternal mortality and legal subordination; men faced conscription, dangerous labor, and social expendability. The female longevity advantage only emerges clearly in the modern era. The point isn't to claim men had it worse - it's that "men have long dominated" obscures that most men were themselves dominated, and bore unique, severe costs within the same system. I agree completely that rigid gender roles harm everyone. But framing current attention to men's issues as acceptable only because "patriarchal roles harm men too" still treats men's suffering as derivative of women's concerns, requiring feminist justification. Can't men's rising suicide rates, educational struggles, and social isolation warrant direct concern on their own terms? The discourse does need less competition. But that requires actually taking men's issues seriously, not just when they can be reframed as collateral damage from patriarchy.
pxc 11mo ago
"Trauma" ultimately just means "severe injury" or something like that, doesn't it? We take it for granted that virtually no one will make it through life without ever sustaining a serious or enduring physical injury. Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
- tossandthrow 11mo ago
  Your view is representing a traditionally more masculine point of view. A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma. What we want as a society is a democratic process, and it is heavily up for negotiation these years. It is completely fine. Personally, my core belief is that whatever we ultimately decide on, it counts for all equivalent regardless of their gender.
  - pxc 11mo ago
    > A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma. I think that's true both for physical and psychological trauma! We should generally avoid preventable injuries and try to live and work with safety in mind. All I meant is that the phrase "[almost] everyone has experienced trauma" doesn't seem that radical or extreme to me. It seems like common sense. (And it's not the same thing as "everyone is falling apart" or something like that.)
- lazide 11mo ago
  If obsessing about such injuries was sufficient to heal them, they would all be long solved.
- sixo 11mo ago
  No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.
- 1dom 11mo ago
21asdffdsa12 11mo ago
I deeply dislike the inherent ideology of psychology. Liberalism, the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole, suffering which may be "noble" for the common good and rights and privileges awarded for suffering in such. I find such a ideologically loaded construct and the inherent biases (idealizations and an inability to talk about the cultural framework and tradeoffs) quite unhelpful for understanding, helping and as a basis for societal meta-communications.
- vacuity 11mo ago
  There is not an inherent ideology to psychology, and I'm not sure what you mean by statements such as "the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole" (not even judging; I actually don't know what you mean).
analog8374 11mo ago
99% of public human interaction is battles for dominance (ego, status, politics...). Which is gross. When psychology enters the conversation it gets even grosser.
elric 11mo ago
Ah yes, the old "out of sight, out of mind"-solution. Only it never solves anything.
PaulRobinson 11mo ago
We're still working a lot of this out because it's actually a relatively new thing culturally - my grandfathers generation would never have talked about mental health at all - but what is pretty clear is that most people do not talk enough about this, and do not deal with mental health very well. That does not mean we should all be talking to everybody about it all the time. I take stuff into a therapy session I'm not going to discuss anywhere else, because if I started talking about it at work, or even close relationships, I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful. But at the same time, we do need to talk to people about it. And there are some toxic barriers we could do with addressing. Men are not "meant" to cry or show vulnerability in almost all contexts in almost all cultures. That's sad, because while we don't all want men breaking down in tears when their coffee order isn't quite right, we also know it's healthy for men to acknowledge and process difficult feelings like grief and rejection. While most people realise it's not OK to tell a woman she'd look prettier if she smiled more, few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident. That causes problems I think we can all call out and name in modern dating culture. According to some stats I just pulled up for the UK, surveys suggest that more than 75% of men report as having had mental health issues, but only 60% have ever spoken to another human being about it at all, with 40% of men stating it would have to be so bad that they are considering self-harm or suicide to talk to anyone, ever. This is horrible. So, sure, perhaps we don't need to talk about Freudian analysis down the pub, and nobody at work wants to hear about you reconciling feelings about how you were treated as a child by members of your family, but please: Most men need to talk to somebody about their mental health. And for many problems, that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it. If you're reading this, and think that might be you, please, for your own sake, go talk to a professional. You might not gel with the first therapist, counsellor, psychiatrist or psychologist you speak to. That's OK, they won't mind if you say you want to try a few different people. You can find people who will help in your town, on video calls, on apps, all over. Just speak to someone.
- zozbot234 11mo ago
  There was certainly quite a bit of deep talk about "integrity" and "character" in our grandfathers' generation, that was ultimately relating to issues we would now comprise under so-called 'mental health'. It's not clear to me that this medicalized framing ("...health") is necessarily and consistently better than a more traditional one focused on developing a well-adjusted character.
SoftTalker 11mo ago
Agree. Some people have legitimate issues. Many just grab at the easy excuse for not achieving anything. “Suck it up and do the work” is still good advice for them.
ajuc 11mo ago
Why?
noufalibrahim 11mo ago
I agree here. There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience. Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default. As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale. As a matter of interest, many of the traits were inspired by someone Doyle worked for named Dr. Joseph Bell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell) who emphasised and used careful observation - a skill that can be very useful to a medical practitioner. The relationship between Bell and Doyle was fictionalised into a series called "Murder Rooms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the_Real_Sherlock_Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the...

wiseowise 11mo ago

> Too much psychology talk in every day life I'm curious to hear how often do you hear it in every day life outside of the internet.

tossandthrow 11mo ago
In all fairness, the internet is for many people a near 100% part of their life. Especially for people working remotely without a family.
- koakuma-chan 11mo ago
  HN is like 70% of my life.
  - pxc 11mo ago
    I also spend what feels to me like a lot of time here. I like it, despite its problems. But HN isn't good enough to deserve to be 70% of anyone's life. :(
    - koakuma-chan 11mo ago
      I agree, but it's 12:10 PM, and I am in my third meeting, pretending to pay attention. I wish the job market improved.
      - pxc 11mo ago
        I feel that. I wish the same.
      - Nevermark 11mo ago
        Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine? Oh … never mind. I have always worked remote and been hermitting recently on a difficult set of (work) challenges. I don’t know what I would do without HN. I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
        koakuma-chan 11mo ago
        > Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine? I don't do alcohol, drugs, et cetera, because I saw other people who did, and found them disgusting. I don't want to be like that. Though if I could easily get my hands on a weapon, I would have probably shot myself already. > I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN. There is also lobste.rs
- lukan 11mo ago
  Well, my nonprofessional opinion about those is, that no amount of therapy can help here, when their problem is isolation and the cure living close to people they like. (But therapy might help them getting there again. True eremits by heart are rare)
sho_hn 11mo ago
It definitely does feel like every American I know "has a therapist", sometimes.
- bear141 11mo ago
  I used to think that therapists were ridiculous. But after having one for six or seven years now, I realize that it’s literally just someone you pay to help you be the happiest and best version of yourself. Maybe everyone doesn’t need that, but I don’t think anyone is inherently always the best version of themselves. What’s the point of not trying to be a little better?
  - saghm 11mo ago
    I feel like the world would be a much better place if literally everyone did have a therapist. Having a neutral, trained professional you talk you for 45 minutes twice a month about things that are tough in your life is not something that should alarm people, but being vehemently against it honestly kind of is...
  - 21asdffdsa12 11mo ago
    The digestion juices of individualistic society?
    - bear141 11mo ago
      Do you mean therapy is designed to teach outcasts how to fit better into the machine? I would agree with that, and while I hate that it is partly true and reject anything like this for myself in general, individual happiness sometimes correlates with greasing your wheels to be a better subject.
  - flatline 11mo ago
    I have been in therapy on and off through most of my life. There are parts of the process and the profession that are helpful. There are also parts that are paternalistic bordering on abusive. “Literally just someone you pay to the be happiest…” is a small part of the picture. I take issue with this view of therapy, and the idea that it is somehow a universal force for good that will benefit everyone. I have met some pretty unhinged therapists - both as a client and socially. I won’t even go into the history of psychiatry and clinical care. One of the questions I like to pose is, what are we doing as a society by sending so many people to therapy? What do these practices do at a large scale? And to all those who decry things like gun violence: if you think our current mental health system would somehow be able to address the larger ills of society if only they had more funding, I have some serious questions about your view of its overarching effectiveness, and the specific effects of these practices.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
walthamstow 11mo ago
At work, like all the time? Empowerment, values, growth mindset, psychological safety, mindfulness, emotional intelligence...
- _cenw 11mo ago
  Half of these aren't people talking about mental health problems, but preconditions for mental health. That's your problem?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - walthamstow 11mo ago
    Seems like we both agree that psychological language can be common in everyday offline life, such as at work for a large company. I don't have a problem with it, not sure where you got that from.
    - _cenw 11mo ago
      You're ignoring the subtext of the comment above yours. > Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately... Their problem isn't with the language itself, but how it is handled in public. That point doesn't really translate if you pivot to creating an environment conductive to mental health.
Fluorescence 11mo ago
Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves. There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic. There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc. There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc. It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.

tossandthrow 11mo ago

This is a valid take. But we need to apply it evenly on the entire society. If we fill up the public discourse with the issues and wants of women and make the issues and wants of men a private matter this will skew the public understanding of the stance of women and men - we see this hardcore these days with boys and men being villainized, made invisible and made suspicious only due to their gender. From here we have two ways forward: Either make sure that mens issues gain a proportionate part of the public discourse or argue that all issues are a private matter.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
Not the commenter, and I 'm not a fan of how normal it has become to do one's dirty laundry in public. But I find it lamentable that the most popular takeaway from the internet's mainstreaming of feminist thought is that men’s issues are necessarily in competition with women's issues for representation. It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".
- tossandthrow 11mo ago
  > It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics This statement has more than one issue: 1. First and foremost, it is simply a rewrite of the history. There is a difference between descriptive and substantive representation. And it is true that men have been descriptively better represented. But the thoughtless implication that this leads to better substantive representation is simply wrong. 2. It justifies the idea of "reparations" for previous generations misdoing. Not only does this induce a high level if dissent, it is simply immoral. Even if we would accept reparations, it is still only justified by the rewrite of the history. I appreciate the call for nuance, but I think the historical framing here deserves scrutiny. You're right that men have dominated politicly, but it's worth distinguishing between who held power (descriptive representation) and whose interests were served (substantive representation). Most men throughout history had no political power - they were subjects of monarchies, excluded by property requirements, or conscripted into wars they didn't choose. The men making decisions were a tiny elite. On "women's issues only recently being better represented" -this depends heavily on what we're measuring. If we look at something like life expectancy as a rough proxy for overall life quality (capturing war mortality, occupational deaths, access to resources, healthcare), historical data suggests men and women faced roughly equal burdens pre-industrialization, just distributed differently. Women faced maternal mortality and legal subordination; men faced conscription, dangerous labor, and social expendability. The female longevity advantage only emerges clearly in the modern era. The point isn't to claim men had it worse - it's that "men have long dominated" obscures that most men were themselves dominated, and bore unique, severe costs within the same system. I agree completely that rigid gender roles harm everyone. But framing current attention to men's issues as acceptable only because "patriarchal roles harm men too" still treats men's suffering as derivative of women's concerns, requiring feminist justification. Can't men's rising suicide rates, educational struggles, and social isolation warrant direct concern on their own terms? The discourse does need less competition. But that requires actually taking men's issues seriously, not just when they can be reframed as collateral damage from patriarchy.

pxc 11mo ago

"Trauma" ultimately just means "severe injury" or something like that, doesn't it? We take it for granted that virtually no one will make it through life without ever sustaining a serious or enduring physical injury. Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?

tossandthrow 11mo ago
Your view is representing a traditionally more masculine point of view. A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma. What we want as a society is a democratic process, and it is heavily up for negotiation these years. It is completely fine. Personally, my core belief is that whatever we ultimately decide on, it counts for all equivalent regardless of their gender.
- pxc 11mo ago
  > A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma. I think that's true both for physical and psychological trauma! We should generally avoid preventable injuries and try to live and work with safety in mind. All I meant is that the phrase "[almost] everyone has experienced trauma" doesn't seem that radical or extreme to me. It seems like common sense. (And it's not the same thing as "everyone is falling apart" or something like that.)
lazide 11mo ago
If obsessing about such injuries was sufficient to heal them, they would all be long solved.
sixo 11mo ago
No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.
1dom 11mo ago

21asdffdsa12 11mo ago

I deeply dislike the inherent ideology of psychology. Liberalism, the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole, suffering which may be "noble" for the common good and rights and privileges awarded for suffering in such. I find such a ideologically loaded construct and the inherent biases (idealizations and an inability to talk about the cultural framework and tradeoffs) quite unhelpful for understanding, helping and as a basis for societal meta-communications.

vacuity 11mo ago
There is not an inherent ideology to psychology, and I'm not sure what you mean by statements such as "the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole" (not even judging; I actually don't know what you mean).

analog8374 11mo ago

99% of public human interaction is battles for dominance (ego, status, politics...). Which is gross. When psychology enters the conversation it gets even grosser.

elric 11mo ago

Ah yes, the old "out of sight, out of mind"-solution. Only it never solves anything.

PaulRobinson 11mo ago

We're still working a lot of this out because it's actually a relatively new thing culturally - my grandfathers generation would never have talked about mental health at all - but what is pretty clear is that most people do not talk enough about this, and do not deal with mental health very well. That does not mean we should all be talking to everybody about it all the time. I take stuff into a therapy session I'm not going to discuss anywhere else, because if I started talking about it at work, or even close relationships, I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful. But at the same time, we do need to talk to people about it. And there are some toxic barriers we could do with addressing. Men are not "meant" to cry or show vulnerability in almost all contexts in almost all cultures. That's sad, because while we don't all want men breaking down in tears when their coffee order isn't quite right, we also know it's healthy for men to acknowledge and process difficult feelings like grief and rejection. While most people realise it's not OK to tell a woman she'd look prettier if she smiled more, few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident. That causes problems I think we can all call out and name in modern dating culture. According to some stats I just pulled up for the UK, surveys suggest that more than 75% of men report as having had mental health issues, but only 60% have ever spoken to another human being about it at all, with 40% of men stating it would have to be so bad that they are considering self-harm or suicide to talk to anyone, ever. This is horrible. So, sure, perhaps we don't need to talk about Freudian analysis down the pub, and nobody at work wants to hear about you reconciling feelings about how you were treated as a child by members of your family, but please: Most men need to talk to somebody about their mental health. And for many problems, that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it. If you're reading this, and think that might be you, please, for your own sake, go talk to a professional. You might not gel with the first therapist, counsellor, psychiatrist or psychologist you speak to. That's OK, they won't mind if you say you want to try a few different people. You can find people who will help in your town, on video calls, on apps, all over. Just speak to someone.

zozbot234 11mo ago
There was certainly quite a bit of deep talk about "integrity" and "character" in our grandfathers' generation, that was ultimately relating to issues we would now comprise under so-called 'mental health'. It's not clear to me that this medicalized framing ("...health") is necessarily and consistently better than a more traditional one focused on developing a well-adjusted character.

SoftTalker 11mo ago

Agree. Some people have legitimate issues. Many just grab at the easy excuse for not achieving anything. “Suck it up and do the work” is still good advice for them.

ajuc 11mo ago

Why?

noufalibrahim 11mo ago

I agree here. There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience. Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default. As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale. As a matter of interest, many of the traits were inspired by someone Doyle worked for named Dr. Joseph Bell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell) who emphasised and used careful observation - a skill that can be very useful to a medical practitioner. The relationship between Bell and Doyle was fictionalised into a series called "Murder Rooms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the_Real_Sherlock_Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the...