It wasn’t normal, it was domestic abuse
This article contains discussions of domestic abuse. If you would like to talk to anyone about this, there are organisations such as Man Kind Initiative and you can click the white “X” in the bottom right hand corner of this page (which will take you straight to Google) if you need to quickly close the site.
Around six months after I escaped a 25 year abusive relationship I received a text message telling me the sale of the marital home had fallen through. The reason for this was my abuser had misrepresented aspects of the house to the estate agent, therefore the perspective buyer, and therefore selling the house was going to be much more complicated than anyone expected.
She was also refusing to reduce the price of the house to its actual value meaning I would be trapped in my currant situation of paying a mortgage and dept repayments connected to my previous life until she decided it was in her interests to actually sell the house, and there was nothing I could do about it.
What I felt was a mixture of helplessness and despondency.
In the previous six months I was fortunate enough to have accessed the services of The Mens Advisory Project and through working with the counsellor I had came to realise that the kicking, hitting, screaming, shouting, throwing things, controlling my every movement and my earning was indeed domestic abuse and not the actions of a nagging wife.
That revelation had been ground breaking and caused a change in my behaviour to stop accepting that abuse as normal and change how I interacted with her. In a similar way sitting in my car in a lay by digesting this information I had a similar revelation.
This feeling I recognised from previous bouts was not depression. It was despondency and it had real world causes.
I had presented to mental health professionals previously with similar symptoms and been diagnosed with depression. I had been treated with Prozac and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This treatment had allowed me to function but had solved none of the problems. Indeed when I told the therapist that my abuser had hit me for following his instructions to make a chart of what I did with my time as she constantly complained that I never did anything he decided that project was unnecessary and we should move on with “something useful”. I was therefore reluctant to return to that poisoned well for help at this juncture.
As I sat in my car watching the traffic I came to the realisation I had choices, and not living was one of those.
I choose to live. I choose to get up every day and attempt to move forward in the hope that one day life would improve. During my darkest days I would revisit those choices and chose to live. During this time I was not inactive. I went to the housing benefit office, I went to Citizens Advice, I went to the Equality Commission and The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. All of them provided empathy, none of them provided any solutions. The fact I had a job rendered me ineligible for any assistance. While I had left the relationship around 90% of my wages had not. It would be approximately another year before the house sold, I cleared my debt and was once again able to pay rent for somewhere to live.
We recently had Mental Health Week and I have a few observations on the effectiveness of this campaign. I have heard mental health professionals, celebrities and Royalty speak about getting men to talk about their mental health. I have heard much about “breaking the taboo” around the subject and “normalising the situation”. I have even heard about using mindfulness and some even brought up the term “coping strategies” however I have heard exactly nothing about providing real world solutions to real world problems.
We know 75% of suicides are male. We know a recent separation or involvement with family court are factors in a high percentage of these deaths. Every time suicide is mentioned on the media they tell us it is a mental health crisis. What if we accepted the radical notion that a high percentage of those deaths were not due to mental health problems but were caused by an absence of hope? Could we go a step further and say that better choices could be part of a solution for these men?
If we can go this far would it be outside the realms of possibility to provide a means-tested benefit that mean men retain 70% of their wages between separation and divorce? Could we fix family court to the point where men are not grieving for children that are still alive, and if we did this would it give hope to the despondent?
The ever increasing male suicide rate is a silent scream that the current ‘cottage industry’ of mental health is broken. Is it loud enough to cause change yet?
Anonymous
