Talking straight: The men who are breaking down the stigma around men’s mental health.
For men, the stigma around mental health can make it nearly impossible to seek help. They often baulk at the idea of going to see someone about their mental health, perhaps because they feel it shows weakness and a fundamental failure to be a man.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
But if they can’t reach out to someone, how can they even begin to unravel what’s going on inside them?
For many men, mental ill-health is channelled into anger and rage — the opposite of weakness perhaps, but a roiling corrosive poison that devours them from the inside.
A man may feel he has nowhere to go, nowhere to turn. He is sinking and the darkness is pressing in on him and there is only one desperate and tragic way out.
According to Lifeline, nine Australians die every day by suicide. That’s more than double the road toll, and 75 per cent of those who take their own life are male.
The tragedy of losing loved ones to suicide is why Dale Wright and Kevin Sidebottom have made it their mission to help men on the brink through their men’s health group, Talking Straight.
The men who participate in Talking Straight are often in difficult situations. Divorce and separation, severe depression and anxiety, and grief over the loss of a loved one, just to name a few.
Many of the participants of Talking Straight confess they probably would have taken their own lives had it not been for the sacred pact they made to their fellow men upon joining the group to remain on this earth.
Now, all they have to do is make a phone call and they will have three or four blokes knocking down their door and literally dragging them away from the precipice. They no longer need to feel alone.
The men gather in Mr Wright’s photography studio where the windows are darkened by a tablecloth covered with more than 200 hand prints from 24 years’ worth of men who have participated in the 13-week Warrior Training Programme.
The men sit in a circle around a table. On the table is a sculpture of a smaller circle made up of rudimentary male figures with their arms around each other’s shoulders that represents the brotherhood of the group.
Brotherhood: The candlelight flickers across the faces of the men who sit in this sacred space, creating the ambience of a “womb”.
The candlelight flickers across the faces of the men who sit in this sacred space, creating the ambience of a “womb” where the men can open their hearts and be vulnerable, sometimes for the first times in their lives.
Some of these men look like they would be more at home sinking pots at their local hotel. Traditionally masculine, self-reliant and stoic men; faded tattoos covering their skin made leathery from the sun and the elements, calloused hands covered in concrete from the job site and voices made raspy from a lifetime of tobacco use.
These are the kind of men who are brought up to spit at this kind of thing, and subsequently they are the type most vulnerable to the insidious nature of suicide.
Because even with the sacred pact these men make to each other, even though they know they have a brotherhood of men who would literally walk through fire to pull them back from the brink, even if they have a beautiful family waiting for them at home, even then suicide lurks at the frayed edges of a psyche ravaged by mental ill-health.
Some people call suicide selfish, but reality changes when a man is faced with that kind of despair.
As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”.
But even if a man is at rock bottom, despises his very being, sees no reason to go on and believes that no-one would miss him if he was gone — even then the men from Talking Straight love him anyway and cling to his life, even if he can’t see the value of it in his current state.
Some of these men have tried to seek professional help with their mental health and failed to achieve any meaningful outcomes. They just want to talk to some “normal blokes”.
At first the men are cagey and withdrawn, but by the second week of attending the group they can’t wait to get back. There is no bullshit, it’s just real, raw pain and fear laid out bare. The stories are different but the hurt is the same for these men, and tears of empathy flow freely in the company.
They used to slap each other on the back when they embraced after a meeting, a manly way to dispel any intimacy. But now they embrace each other with more intimacy than they would their father. Because some of their fathers never showed them any intimacy.
These men have learned from each other how to love, and more importantly, how to be loved.
These men are sharing their story to send a message of hope to other men: There are those out there who understand and want to support you, total strangers who are ready to welcome you lovingly like the prodigal son.
And it’s all free. Dale and Sidey won’t take any money. The only price is your word, your integrity and your solemn oath that you will follow through with the group and that you will remain on this earth to do so.
Phone Dale or Sidey on 5821 1864 for a chat, bearing in mind numbers are limited.
If you need support, contact Lifeline Australia on 131 114 and BeyondBlue on 1300 224 636.
