Time To Replenish Self-Worth in Australian Society.

In the last two months two young men I knew were found dead, alone.  One in his home, the other in a hotel room.  Neither case was deemed suicide but in both cases, alcohol was a factor and in one, also a low-level amount of a recreational drug.  Less of a case of taking their lives than it was not loving themselves enough, in the times leading up to their deaths to take good care of themselves.

Of course, there were signs and of course family and friends, people a great deal closer to them than I was, put extraordinary efforts in to help them.  Now, as with all similar unnecessary and premature deaths, those left behind are always going to ask themselves, what more they could have done, what they could have done better?  Some wishing that they’d known how desperately unhappy they must have been so they would have tried harder, and others, why didn’t they just didn’t know.

That these young men were in such dire straits and so mentally unhappy in the times leading up to their deaths is another layer of tragedy.  We can more easily process a sudden, if tragic death in a car accident if the person we knew was otherwise happy in their lives up to that time.  That these young men had immeasurable depths of depression leading up to their passing saddens us all the more.

In processing it, the assumption is that if we were in their shoes, this is how we would feel and this is what we would do and also what we wouldn’t.  It is at that point we actually let them down most of all.  Because none of us were experiencing it through our otherwise healthy mindsets.  Mindsets that enable us to get through the tough times we all inevitably face.  Clearly, for these two young men, they felt the crushing weight of their respective traumas too much to bear.  Though none of us should feel at fault.  We are just not equipped to help them when their anguish takes them to a place so dark, they can no longer be reached. Slowly crushing them, a black hole sucking all light and love from them.

But all of us need to take on board that there is so much more to do if we are to tackle the scourge that infects far too many young men today – despair.  Young men so deeply depressed that hope is no longer in sight.  It’s not hard to pinpoint some of the external factors that led to these two young men feeling so desperately unhappy from past ordeals in their lives.  Or to understand that their current circumstances were exacerbating their depressed state. What we have to get better at as a society, is tackling expectations of one another, especially when it comes down to measures of success, of positions in society, of notions of ‘strength’, ‘worthwhileness’.  It’s past time for us all to be cutting each other more slack.  

Outside of these two extraordinarily sad episodes, young men across Australia and no doubt the world are similarly suffering with their mental health in no small part due to ever present economic pressures and a rising sense of loss of purpose in an increasingly competitive and ever more complicated world.  Modern society is depleting humanity’s stocks of self-worth.  Draining it from young men in particular.  Bleeding from them an awareness of their value, something precious and which is so vital for their mental health.  There’s no easy fix, no easy answer but working towards a more equal society and aiming for a fairer, less stressful life for all of us, may lessen the pressure on some of the young men in our society.  Hopefully to the extent we live in a world where they find the time to like and look after themselves a lot better than too many of them are at the moment and we find time to help them to do just that.