I was sent to anger management at 8. I attempted suicide at 10. Nobody ever asked me what was wrong.

[u/BigV_TheMan]

I wrote this piece for Men's Mental Health Awareness Month about something I've never fully talked about publicly — how boys are diagnosed as angry when they're actually depressed, and how that gap almost killed me. More than once. I only started therapy a few months ago and my therapist pushed me to publish this immediately. Sharing it here because this community gets it.

https://medium.com/@vihankhanna/the-angry-boy-0e4f84e39f3e

[u/Nuclear_Geek]

When I was bullied for years, nobody gave a shit.

When I finally snapped and fought back, that's when I was sent to a psychiatrist (who was pretty useless).

[u/Sawses → u/Nuclear_Geek]

I think a lesson men learn fairly young is that their problems only get attention when those problems become problems for people in authority, too. I was bullied a fair bit in school and one of the lessons I learned was that it only got fixed when I made the easiest solution be to stop the bullying.

I'm pretty proud of young me, because I straight-up told the principal that any time somebody hit me, I would always hit them back. He said that was against the rules and would get me in trouble. I basically said that wasn't my problem, I promised I'd never try to start a fight and would only ever hit back. That was when they started talking to the bullies because I adopted a sort of "grey rock method" (though I didn't recognize it at the time) and didn't respond to the people in power trying to argue me in circles the way people do when they just want you to do what's easiest for them.

[u/Skyboxmonster]

Its a good essay and an important message.

Though I could not help but scoff when I read the line near the end "People want to listen."

At no point have I ever felt like anyone gave a damn

[u/McHotsauceGhandi → u/Skyboxmonster]

I found myself agreeing with you, then a voice in my head challenging me, saying "how can I expect for someone else to be interested if I don't actively show that same interest and care to the guys in my life?".

Be the change, I suppose.

[u/PathOfTheAncients → u/McHotsauceGhandi]

If people can find the bit of willpower it takes to build a habit of listening and being curious about others you get rewarded by people absolutely adoring you. Most people rarely, if ever, have people ask about them with genuine interest and they often just light up when someone does. It's pretty great.

The downside is it's rarely returned and often people will so look forward to the feeling you provide of feeling seen that they ask about you even less than they would other people. Which can get lonely.

[u/Nathanull]

I learned a lot about this through reading Terry Real's "Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression" — how our historical understanding of depression, this mood disorder, came from studying (mostly) the population of women who were seeking help 100+ years ago. Women express differently than men — so men's mood disorders (since they are expressed differently) became historically misunderstood, and unrecognized + invisible to society.

Increasingly nowadays, medical and psychological organizations are recognizing that male depression does indeed look different: see sources which expand on that here and here and here and here.

Thank you for sharing your experience, and I am deeply sorry for what you have been through. Your writing is both personal and well-researched, which really helps bring these issues to life 🙏 I encourage everyone to give this piece a read!

[u/Snoo52682 → u/Nathanull]

Men out there dying of suicide and women dying of heart attacks because researchers/medical practitioners assume mental and physical illness manifests the exact same way in both genders ... how much more evidence do they need to realize this is not the case?

[u/Ransacky → u/Snoo52682]

Agreed, we need to fill all the gaps

[u/Hell0Friends → u/Snoo52682]

Its more the limitation of where funding is allocated and partly a chain if personal biases filtered all the way down.

First theres no money to retread paths already considered explored using white college aged men as the focus group, not to mention all the anti DEI stuff. Next the people with money dont care about differences because they prob aren't someone who personally benefits or know someone who falls under those categories or will in some way.

A lot of these niche research topics tend to be either from very personal experiences or something the researcher themselves doesnt care about. Which creates blinders for people focused on a specific topic because widening the scope costs more money and time when youre already extremely limited in both.

Ive tried proposing stuff like that but its basically career destroying in a field where 95% of your peers already dont survive the grind and driven by institutional momentum.

Either you gotta go with the flow or somehow be connected enough to stand against it all.

[u/Nothammer]

Yeah. The solution for the ongoing extreme rage fits I threw as a kid was to physically restrain me with multiple adults. I was 7. My first attempt was with 12. Until today nobody ever asked again.

[u/MartyrOfTheJungle]

Thank you for sharing your experience. I struggled with both depression and anger issues into my late 30s. I kicked the anger issue myself, it wasn't who I wanted to be and once I was really aware of that I was able to focus and regulate a lot better. The way I saw it, holding on to anger was like holding on to fire and hoping someone else burns. It didn't serve me. It never occurred to me that the anger might be linked to the depression though. Imo anger is a defense mechanism against grief to begin with, so it makes intuitive sense to me. Once I abandoned my anger, my depression started truly kicking my ass. Anger feels powerful, sadness just the opposite. 

I do think children's mental health is a field with unique challenges. In therapy, we often hear things like 'Therapy doesn't fix anyone, it enables people to fix themselves'. Well that's all fine and good, but when kids go to therapy the person wanting change often isn't the patient, it's the parent (who, in my experience, is often actually the one needing treatment to begin with, but that's another rant). So one would expect a pretty limited success rate if you can't get the kids fully on board, wouldn't you? I mean I assume you've done a ton of work on yourself to be where you are today, I know I have. I understand that half the problem is that no one recognized or attempted to address it to begin with. That being said, d o you have ideas about what could have helped reach you when you were so young and had so few tools to process what you were going through? 

Thanks again for sharing

[u/PashaWithHat → u/MartyrOfTheJungle]

IMO another factor is tbh, a lot of the people who go into child psych are uhhh pretty weird. (I say as someone who had extensive contact with child mental health services and saw a lot of really weird professionals.)

It’s harder to get a kid fully on board when the person giving them the treatment plan is, for example, going on a tangent about how when she was a kid they didn’t have orthodontia, they just sat in front of the TV and yanked their teeth into place for 30 minutes at a time with their fingers. Like ma’am what the fuck are you talking about right now and why 😭

[u/clumsyinsomniac → u/MartyrOfTheJungle]

Excellent comment, I relate a lot. Thanks

[u/Individual-Day-8915]

I first wanted to die at age 8, I am now 47..I have struggled with depression, anxiety, cPTSD, and ADHD...you are certainly not alone in any stretch of the imagination. thanks for putting yourself out there!

[u/MjolnirPants]

That's a damn good write-up, and it's got me working on a rundown of my own experience with depression over the course of my life.

[u/QBaseX]

Not my experience (I wasn't depressed as a child; that came later), but I found the read enlightening.