That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
How much, I wonder, does the lack of an emotional education contribute to depression among young men?
By an emotional education I mean an education in, among other things, how to cope with the emotional pain that accompanies the major disappointments we all experience from time to time in life.
I am specifically concerned with young men in this regard because young women get a sort of rudimentary emotional education from each other since they talk more freely about feelings and relationship problems. It's far from a perfect system, as the level of self-harm among young women suggests, but it is better than nothing.
The whole concept of an emotional education is one we have never really embraced. Thirty or 40 years ago students learned something in Christian doctrine classes about dealing with life's problems. Whatever we may think today about what they were taught, they were at least given some framework within which to address the vicissitudes of life.
Young men were also probably more inclined at that time to listen to the advice of older men on handling life's challenges. In the 1960s and 1970s the cult of youth was already beginning to grow and the status of older people was already falling. Nevertheless, an older person who had gained experience of life and who had fashioned a philosophy out of that experience might get a better hearing then than now.
Work at the time was more physical than it is today. We know that physical exercise helps to combat depression and exercise has been officially listed in the UK as a treatment for depression. So a hard day's physical work, of the sort that we would probably all run away from today, was probably good for people's mental health.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the belief among those who study the history of such things that there is more depression today than there was early in the 20th century when life was physically much harder than it is now?
Does this leave us in a situation in which young men are at sea when it comes to knowing how to be with their feelings? Is this why young men, and of course many young women, use alcohol to a degree which seems to have less to do with enjoyment than a deadening of their experience of their own emotions?
Alcohol and drugs will work for a while when it comes to coping with pain or with avoiding life's difficulties. Unfortunately, they do not go on working indefinitely. There are problems that you cannot fix with booze. Some of these problems may be caused by the booze or drugs themselves.
You can get through a lot of years in a cannabis haze until the day you realise you have spent a lot of years getting nowhere and that you do not know what to do about it.
It is when young men hit this particular wall that they are in real trouble. And perhaps it is in this area that we need to think of intervening to boost their emotional health and to build their resilience in the face of the challenges thrown up by life.
Is there a place in the education system for a determined effort to provide an emotional education for young men and young women? Might it not pay off wonderfully in reducing damage to young minds and bodies?
It would not necessarily be easy to devise and implement such a programme of emotional education in the schools. It would raise fears and would cost money. Anybody who remembers the campaign of opposition to the introduction of the Stay Safe programme for primary schools will be aware of just how controversial such a valuable and well-meaning move can be. Thankfully, the programme was eventually introduced and may have saved many a child from abuse.
If we want to improve the emotional health of young men and, indeed, young women, then perhaps we need, as a society, to do more educating and less preaching.
Padraig O'Morain's book Like A Man - a guide to men's emotional wellbeing is published by Veritas. His blog is at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com