How Gay Men Talk About Depression

Korner H, Newman C, Mao L, Kidd MR, Saltman D, & Kippax S (2010). ‘The black dog just came and sat on my face and built a kennel’: Gay men making sense of depression. Health (London, England : 1997) PMID: 21169202

The unpleasant title notwithstanding…

I was reading something in the weekend press, about how the affluent middle-class have ever so conveniently constructed themselves as the most oppressed and who, despite their considerable suffering, constantly rise to the challenge by buying organic groceries and participating in worm farm drives or other similarly socially-minded stuff. With the middle-class more oppressed than anyone, it figures that the strains of living under the hammer would be constructed around their paper clip problems and so, depression and similar fatigues are reconfigured to suit. Call it a freaky malaise of suburban cod-ordinariness.

The plasticity of depressive symptoms to assuage subjective needs makes a mockery of psychiatry’s claims that depression is a ‘real’ disease but for now, I do not intend to re-fry that old fish (2010, n.pag.). What intrigues me more so about this article by Korner et al. (2010), in which gay men discuss their own experiences of depression, is that despite the pick and choose nature of mental disorder, there remains hefty pressure to conform to the pick and choose diagnostic criteria contained within the DSM-IV (2010). Hence, almighty tensions can exist between depression ‘as is’ and depression as it ‘should’ be…

‘Decontextualized views of depression outside the lived experience impose a certain framework of reference on a patient’s experience without any regard of that experience (Galasinski, 2008a), leading to a disembodied understanding of depression which suppresses the plurality of meanings that arise out of experience (Masse, 2000). In fact, ignoring patients’ unique circumstances can raise questions about the validity of an instrument, as, for example, in the case of fatigue in people living with HIV/AIDS (Barroso and Sandelowski, 2001)’ (2010).

The authors (2010) borrow more Galasinski (2008b) to argue that depression is an ‘illness’ which is antithetical to masculine ideals. Men are meant to be ‘strong, successful [and] in control’ (2010) and yet normatively experienced, depression typically smashes the shite out of its sufferers. Herein lies the problematic of meshing and then trying to untangle what components, or symptoms of depression are associated with an organic disease state and what are, in fact, gendered behaviours that emerge from how men, and women for that matter, come to think that they are supposed to ‘do’ depression.

As much as we can ponder why a man self-confessed or called ‘depressed’ resists constructing himself as ‘ill’ (2010), we can ponder why a woman similarly afflicted might so easily give over to the medical hegemon…

So how do gay men do depression…?

The 40 gay men* interviewed by Korner et al. (2010) for this study gave up six (6) different constructions of depression…

1. as symptoms…

‘Oh, depression? It’s a state of depressed mood and inability to progress, things you need to do. Yeah, depressed, lowered mood and an inability to think yourself out beyond the emotional situation, I guess’ (1.2: Keith)’ (2010)

2. as experience…

‘It’s when you’re feeling that low you have to deal with everyday life. And you just feel like you can’t. Until the weight of it lifts. The hardest part is the cloudiness and no clarity. You can’t concentrate and you just feel miserable about everything. And you know, you just, no matter what you try you just can’t seem to lift out of it’ (2.1: Brad)’ (2010)

3. as agent…

‘It just sits there and brews. And usually for me it will end up brewing to the point where it will come out as anger. I won’t take it out on people…It will all brew very suddenly up until the point where I might catch the door, catch my finger in the door or something, and I’ll just put my foot through it’ (3.2: Brett)’ (2010)

4. as mental process…

‘For me depression is often a cyclical thing. I’m thinking cyclical thoughts. Just ruminating on one particular thing: ‘Nobody likes me’, you know? I have a mantra, negative ones usually, which I don’t use any more…And the way I would deal with problems is to go into them and just completely wrap myself up in them, and not let go of them at all (4.2: Mark)’ (2010)

5. as not meeting social expectations…

‘The meaning of life is confused and purposefulness in life is confused or probably not even there. So it’s a rather unpleasant experience. Particularly in the light of all the things that are required of an individual in a day of living: work, good humour and maintaining relationships, and all that sort of thing (5.3: Lucian)’ (2010)

6. as engaging with psychiatric discourse…

‘I know within the medical sphere that they have many different terminologies for depression, i.e. clinical, blah, blah, blah. But in terms of myself, in regards to my own path, depression is that black dog which has kept me company so many times throughout my life. It’s a very, very, very (italics in original), very faithful companion. One which is there. And having lost so many people in my life, it’s a faithful companion you can always rely on (6.3: Scott)’ (2010)

Gay men constitute a ‘subordinate masculinity’ (2010) and as such, we are expected to be emotionally frail and vulnerable to experience and express the textbook symptoms of depression (sobbing, faltering, withdrawing etc.). We are also expected to be more depressed than our straight counterparts are (2010). That said, the participants in this study made purposeful choices to acquiesce to, challenge, or navigate around dominant ideologies, namely medical orthodoxy and hegemonic masculinity (2010). In so doing, they demonstrated behaviours that potentially could transform how any man decides to do depression, or not…

Like, for example, choosing not to be violent toward others, instead of being violent toward others and then blaming the dreaded ‘black dog’ (2010)…