I’ve been reading the recent research on why our generation seems to be more at risk for problems with depression and suicide than previous ones. I learned a few facts I did not know:
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80% of all suicides in the US are men
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Male suicide at midlife is 3 times higher than average
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20 million Americans experience depression sometime in their lives
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60-80% of depressed adults never get professional help
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80-90% of people seeking help get relief from professional help
One psychologist, Jed Diamond, has written a book called Male Menopause, and Surviving Male Menopause published in 2000. In his practice, he has observed middle age to be a low point for feelings of well-being, just like the recent research has shown among 2 million people in 80 different nations.
The main difference in the US is that women hit this low point earlier, around age 39 or 40 (perimenopause) and men hit it right past age 50.
Diamond uses a metaphor to theorize why midlife can be so difficult. We all start out life climbing a mountain. Somewhere around midlife, we recognize that we have gotten as far up as we are going to get and start down the other side. For most of human history coming down that mountain would be what we were doing prior to death…as late as 1910 most of us died before age 50.
However, now, rather than being the beginning of the end as most fear, it is a new beginning. There is a second mountain to climb, the mountain of second adulthood. Diamond says, “For most people this climb can help us become more powerful, more passionate, and more productive than at any time of our lives.”
See, so those of us going through “the valley of midlife” can look forward to climbing a whole new mountain…sounds exhausting to me!
Maybe we all just get pooped out with the inevitable unfairness and considerable disappointments in life. Between major feelings of failure that can come from a divorce or job loss, problems with teenagers, illness, international and environmental disasters, perhaps it just all gets to be too much.
Sometimes I wonder why so many of us continue on under these circumstances. I wrote an essay about this, because I believe it often takes Extraordinary Courage to make it through life:
One must think like a hero, to behave like a merely decent human being. -May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
