Is Masculinity Killing Men
[Applause]
so
i’m sitting alone in my car it’s
a warm summer night
and
i’ve probably been staring at my phone
for like a little bit too long
the number that i’ve tapped into the
screen is for the suicide hotline
there’s just one problem
i can’t bring myself
to call
because i’m a man not some princess i
shouldn’t
need to be rescued
so
instead an ex-girlfriend who owes me
nothing
is frantically calling up my friends
crying while she tries to save my life
she really shouldn’t have to be a part
of this story but because she loves me
she is
so i want you to keep her in mind we’re
going to come back to her
maybe ironically at this stage in my
life i’m a success
i work with fortune 500 brands i deliver
on project work with staggering massive
price tags with too many zeros
and
every single day for two and a half
years
i wake up feeling numb
and empty
and alone like i just can’t stop
drowning
and i’m here today to tell you that the
rate of male suicide is
skyrocketing
it’s higher than it’s ever been
i
survived
i suppose um and what i learned might
save the life of someone that you know
and in order to do that
we’re going to take an unlikely journey
where the first stop is
baby aspirin so by show of hands who
here has heard of the fact that if you
have a baby aspirin it can reduce your
risk of having a stroke
a lot of hands and i want you to keep
those hands up if you know exactly what
percent difference that baby aspirin
actually makes
okay uncomfortable laughter looks of
confusion that’s that’s pretty much
where i was at with it as well
so i started doing the research
and for this particular study what they
found was
if you give people an aspirin within 48
hours of them having symptoms of
ischemic stroke one of the most common
types of stroke
for every 100 people that participate
one of them will be able to raise their
hands and say
hey that aspirin
it saved my life
and they won’t have to go to the
hospital they won’t have complications
they won’t even have a follow-up stroke
and so even though that aspirin is
arguably like one percent effective
i’m also going to argue that the reason
why so many of you knew about that
connection between aspirin and stroke is
because that aspirin is a minor miracle
it’s a simple solution many of us have
access to it and the end result when it
works is
lives get saved and changed
so
what if there was an aspirin
but for suicide
so in 2019 the cdc estimated that there
were 1.38 million suicide attempts in
the united states alone for just that
year
so that one percent would go a long way
but if we can accomplish what i think we
can accomplish tonight and you all seem
like a pretty smart bunch that seems
pretty likely to me then the difference
won’t be one percent
it’ll be 60 times that
but since suicide starts in the mind
it’s not really a pill that we need to
swallow it’s more of a thought an idea
and one that directly counteracts
another one
and one place to begin to look is what
thoughts then
are causing men to kill themselves
and if the research is to be believed it
all points to one very specific kind of
stubborn thought and that as a man
i need to blank
as a man i need to be strong i need to
keep my word i need to have a
magnificent mustache
and i’m a little bit upset that i can’t
grow one
and uh
as a man i need to protect the people
that i love and
that last one especially is a piece of
masculinity that
i love that that exists i’m proud of
that
but masculinity is more than just four
ideas kind of mushed together it’s like
this big messy world of ideas that we
hold together with like twine and glue
and spit right it’s really complicated
but to begin to understand what we’re
working with we need to also unpack that
so
what comes to mind for you when you hear
the word
masculine
and i want you to shout out your answers
proud strong good yes
stoke is a good one
brave leader awesome i’m looking for one
more
protector
good
so basically
what you’ve given me is
batman right like
and maybe maybe he has a beard too
and and this is perfect right this is an
example of our cultural givens um this
is what we were raised to believe that a
proper man should be and i don’t know
about you but i was raised to believe
that as a man
crying was kind of the ultimate act of
shame
i also grew up believing as a corollary
to that that like emotions were just as
bad i understood that emotions were
appropriate for like two demographics
the first of which was like schoolgirls
and then
and the second one was womenfolk which i
was neither of those things so i
shouldn’t have feelings and begin to
push those away
but the thing is
the thing that they never really tell
you about that is how after a lifetime
of practice
maybe one day eventually you succeed
and then you get to wish that you really
hadn’t
because you’ll have also succeeded at
pushing away the thing that makes you
human
what they don’t tell you about that is
while you’re pushing away
crying you also kind of begin to
suppress the other emotions in your life
the happiness the joy and then one day
you wake up and you realize
your entire life has been about going
through the motions
it doesn’t matter what you’re doing
whether you’re riding a roller coaster
or at a theme park or at a wedding you
can’t feel anything
no matter how much you try
and while you’re distracted with that
thought
then one day maybe something really bad
happens something that you can’t
push away
and your emotions are screaming
it breaks you
those emotions they want to come out but
they can’t because you’ve gotten too
good at this that just pushing them down
and so instead reality just starts to
hurt
it hurts and it feels empty at the same
time and
you don’t know how to make that stop
so as a man
you endure
you grit your teeth you push through it
because that’s what you’re supposed to
do
so i think
what i’d like to do is kind of
create a little bit of levity here and
just collective breath out if you’ve
been holding it
i’m so grateful and lucky to have that
chapter in my life
over and done with
um
i think looking back one of the scariest
parts for me was seeing how
at some point i got to a place where
suicide just kind of made logical sense
instead of all the pain that i was
experiencing
i could just have no pain
there was there was no drama to it
um and that for me was the most
frightening part
what i’m aiming to accomplish here today
is to help people who are in
that space
find their way home because i know how
dark it can get
and in order to do that we need to turn
to the research so what is
what does the research have to say about
what’s happening here
if we take a look it all seems to boil
down to actually something really simple
something easy to address at least one
paper and it looks like this
it’s a cycle with only two steps to it
and the first is a hard life event and
for a lot of guys it might be divorce or
losing a home losing a job going through
a breakup or losing a family member or
the physical health just something that
hits us hard enough that we’re forced to
feel something even if we’re busy trying
to push that away
and that very naturally leads us to a
place of suppression
as a man
i shouldn’t have feelings
so
stuff them down
but if if you’re anything like me then
that also comes with this constellation
of other behaviors
so it might look like you also stop
sleeping
you start eating poorly you stop working
out you self-isolate you get into more
fights maybe you start drinking some
more
and uh
the research is beginning to show that
when you take on that kind of behavior
especially not asking for help right and
that’s a really commonplace one
like
i don’t know about you but my personal
game plan when i’m hurting is to notice
the pain first
and then ignore it really really really
really hard and hope that eventually at
some point it goes away
but when you do that
research shows that you also become more
likely to fall ill or get injured or die
as a complication and if it doesn’t
happen to us
then it’s liable to happen to someone
that we know that we care about another
male family member a male friend
and so you can see just how insidious
this cycle is we’ve just immediately
gone back to the first stage which draws
us back into stage two
and research out of fordham university
is showing that for men who reject
things like crying or being moody or
having emotions at all
we’re up to two and a half times roughly
two and a half times more likely to die
by suicide
which is a pretty grim statistic
but
for me it kind of also represents the
way forward that’s the ground that we
have to gain
this is a clear bridge between emotional
suppression and men killing themselves
and we’re going to come back to that
the thing that
i think that hurts the most though for
me to know as as a human is that it’s
not just affecting grown men
males between the ages of 10 and 24
this is the second leading cause of
death for them
i’m going to say that again because it
bears repeating and with statistics it
can be easy to kind of get lost in the
numbers there’s no impact in that
so instead i want you to imagine that
there’s a 10 year old boy
and he’s on the playground and he’s got
his friends running around screaming
around him but he’s not participating
because
today
is the day that he’s chosen to die
and if that hits you
if what you feel right now is sadness
and grief and loss or shock anger
then know that that’s the appropriate
response because
that should have never been allowed to
happen
and it can be so easy to take a look at
this situation and ask ourselves
who am
i who am i in the face of this 1.38
million suicide attempts every single
year
what difference could i possibly make
but that
in my opinion leaves room for the
world’s
greatest answer
what difference can i make
the difference i can make
and we only need to interrupt one part
of this cycle to make that difference
before it all falls apart and the
easiest the most straightforward thing
that we can do as a society is address
that bit around suppression
and what that can look like
some of you are not going to like
but
when we’re having a hard day
instead of popping on netflix and binge
watching shows until we pass out on the
couch
and start drooling
maybe it looks like
reluctantly picking up the phone
calling someone that we trust and saying
hey
today’s today was really hard
it really hurt
i feel kind of alone right now and i
could really use someone to talk to
about this
and then we commit the cardinal thing of
masculinity
and we talk about our feelings we talk
about the things that we normally would
never talk about
instead of pretending like we’re fine
and it begins here with
each and every one of you
with me with us
it begins here so that
the people in our lives can begin to
unsuppress they can begin to treat this
like it’s normal
it begins here so that that 10 year old
boy
he can do what he does best
and he can do as we do
not as we tell him to
it begins here so that we can look at
every every single dark statistic that
i’ve given you here today
and say
this
is the difference
i can make
and in the beginning we spoke of a
girl it’s time to bring her back into
the story because
there’s something about emotions that’s
so important
that we just haven’t talked about yet
so she used to tell me that she loved me
more than i would ever know
and i’m sad to say that she was right
i was so busy pushing away my emotions
that i didn’t have any room for hers
especially not her love
so i didn’t get it
i didn’t get it when she begged me not
to leave
i didn’t get it when she cried with her
hands shaking
because she didn’t want to be alone
and despite all of that
she still fought with everything that
she had to make sure that i survived
i’m going to take a step back from this
too because i know how that sounds and
so for reassurances she’s doing great
right now
and she’s living a very different life
as part of that she and i don’t really
talk anymore
so this next part goes out to her as
much as it goes out to each and every
one of you
i’m so
sorry
for who i was
for the damage that that caused
and i’m so grateful for everything that
you did
because
now i finally get it
i get how sometimes emotions can feel
weak and brittle they can make us feel
vulnerable and sometimes they’re the
last thing that i want to do
but i also get that sometimes
from a thousand miles away
they give us a second shot at life
one that we could have never earned
and so today i’m going to leave you with
an invitation
i’m inviting you to give that same gift
to the people in your life that you love
that minor miracle
that baby aspirin
i’m inviting you
today
for just a few moments
to stop thinking so much
and just to allow yourself to feel
i’m inviting you
to allow yourselves to be human again
thank you
[Music]
[Applause]
you