Mental Health

I recently had new business cards printed. They read: “Jed Diamond, PhD—Helping men and the women who love them since 1969.” My career helping men began on November 21, 1969 when I held my newborn son in my arms and made a vow to be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and do everything I could to help create a world where fathers were fully healed and involved with their families throughout their lives.

            Although I had worked in the mental health field for many years and written fifteen books, I only recently was able to tell the whole story about my father’s mental illness and the healing journey that saved his life. In my 16^th book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound, I quoted men’s health advocate Roland Warren who said,

“Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that hole, it can leave a wound that is not easily healed.”

            It took me a long time to realize I was a kid with a hole in his soul and that I had tried to fill it by making money and becoming a success in my profession but had avoided the real work of addressing my father wound. I came to see that my father wound was really a family wound that impacted multiple generations. I wanted to be sure I didn’t pass on the wounding to my own children and grandchildren.

            I learned that the wound is there for many who grew up as I did with a mother who did her best to raise me after my father had left when I was five years old. But many experience the wounding in other ways.

“A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit,”

says psychologist James Hollis.

“His absence may be literal through death, divorce, or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he also may not have acquired.”

            I was told that my father had “a nervous breakdown” and was committed to the state mental hospital for treatment. It was only years later when I found the journals my father had kept during the years leading up to his hospitalization that I got a glimpse into his mind and what led to the despair that overwhelmed him. Here are a few excerpts:

July 3:
“Oh, Christ, if I can only give my son a decent education—a college decree with a love for books, a love for people, good, solid knowledge. No guidance was given to me. I slogged and slobbered and blundered through two-thirds of my life.”

July 24:
“My dear wife, my beautiful son, I love you both so much, but how do I get the bread to support you? The seed of despair is part of my heritage. It lies sterile for months and then it gnaws until its bitter fruit chokes my throat and swells in me like a large goiter blacking out room for hopes, dreams, joy, and life itself.”

August 8:
“Sunday morning, my humanness has fled, my sense of comedy has gone down the drain. I’m tired, hopelessly tired, surrounded by an immense brick wall, a blood-spattered brick world, splattered with my blood, with the blood of my head where I senselessly banged to find an opening, to find one loose brick, so I could feel the cool breeze and could stick out my hand and pluck a handful of wheat, but this brick wall is impregnable, not an ounce of mortar loosens, not a brick gives.”

December 8:
“Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work, Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.”

February 24:
“Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop.”

June 12:
“A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried.

“All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in June, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

I grew up wondering what happened to my father and when it would happen to me. I did go to college and graduated with honors as my father hoped I would and later received a four year, full-tuition, fellowship to U.C. San Francisco Medical School. I hoped to become a psychiatrist and I naively thought that if I could get educated enough I would learn the magic that would protect me from whatever disease had infected my father.

When I arrived at medical school in 1965 with dreams of becoming a healer, it was clear that this was mostly a place for white men. There were few minorities and even fewer women. Before classes began the scholarship students were wined and dined at a faculty home in elegant Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The message soon became clear: You are the elite and chosen ones. Follow the rules, do what you are told, don’t rock the boat, and this will all be yours someday.

Coming from a working-class family whose parents were radical politically and active socially, this was the wrong message for me. I also realized that what I was learning in medical school offered very little about the causes and treatment for what ailed my father. I decided to leave and transfer to U.C. Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare.

However, before I could leave I had to see a psychiatrist. From their perspective, anyone who wanted to leave medical school, give up a full-ride scholarship, and go into social work, must be crazy. I left anyway. You learn the rest of the story in my book, My Distant Dad, and in my on-line course, “Healing the Family Father Wound.”

            Leaving medical school and going into social work not only seemed crazy at the time to the psychiatrist I was forced to see, but also to my friends and family who were looking forward to having “a docta in the family.” But it was the right choice for me. It has offered a career that has been meaningful and fulfilling in all the ways that count. I have also made a great living doing what I love to do.

            In 2021, I was sent a review copy of a new book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, who was at the time a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. I interviewed Reeves and his experiences mirrored my own.

“When I was thirteen, my father lost his job,”

he said.

“He was hardly alone: this was in the early 1980s in the UK, and he worked in manufacturing. It took months for him to find work. Each morning he would appear at the breakfast table, freshly showered, in a shirt and tie. Then he would go to his desk to check for new job postings and send out résumés.

One day I asked him, ‘Why do you still dress so smartly when you don’t have a job to go to?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I do still have a job. My job is to get another job so I can take care of all of you.’ I’ll never forget that moment. I saw, for the first time, that Dad’s job wasn’t just that mysterious thing he went off to do every morning. It was a manifestation of the relationship of care between him and the rest of the family.”

In Of Boys and Men, Reeves shares ideas that parallel my understanding about the nature of the problem we face.

“It became clear to me that the problem of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are rarely treated as such. The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men. It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time.”

Reeves goes on to say,

“Men are struggling in the labor market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs. And fathers are dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.”

Why You Might Want To Consider Men’s Mental Health As A Career Choice.

            Reeves recently founded the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) to inform policy and public dialogue with non-partisan research so that boys and men from all backgrounds can lead healthy, happy, and meaningful lives. He offers the following information about the health needs of boys and men. In January 2024, AIBM issued a report titled “Where Are the Men? Male Representation in Social Work and Psychology,” detailing the following information:

• Mental health needs are pervasive among men, yet the share of men meeting those needs in mental health professions is low and declining.

• Boys and men are currently much less likely to receive treatment for mental health conditions. In 2022, 27% of women reported receiving mental health treatment in the previous 12 months compared to only 16% of men.

• There is strong evidence that socialization and norms contribute to men’s reluctance to seek out the care they may need.

• At a time when suicide among men is at an all-time high, the share of men working in mental health-related professions has recently reached all-time lows.

• In 1968, men made up approximately 38% of the social work workforce, compared to 18% in 2023. The psychology workforce has seen a particularly large drop in the share of men, falling from 68% in 1968 to 20% today.

• This trend appears set to continue. In 2023, the mean age of male psychologists was 60, compared to a mean age of 47 for female psychologists.

• If the downward trend in male representation were to continue at the same average rate as since 1968, the psychology profession would have no men at all by 2046, and the social work profession would be male free by 2070. Obviously, these are simple extrapolations rather than predictions, but serve to illustrate the sharpness of the decline.

• The decline is not receiving much policy attention, especially by comparison to the justified focus on the share of women in STEM and other historically male-dominated occupations.

Chapter 11 of Reeves book Of Boys and Men is titled, “Men Can Heal: Getting Men into the Jobs of the Future.” He says,

“The gender desegregation of the labor market has been almost entirely one way. In particular, the share of men in HEAL occupations—remains stubbornly low.”

He quotes Gloria Steinem who said,

“We can do anything that men can do.”

Reeves goes on to say,

“But men are NOT saying ‘We can do anything that women can do.’ More men can certainly do HEAL jobs. And given the trends in the labor market, they must.”

For years I have been a leader in the emerging field of gender-specific healthcare and have offered two previous trainings for those who would like to enter this emerging field. I am now developing a new training program which I will be offering in the coming months. If you would like more information, you can send me an email to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Men’s Mental Health Training” in the subject line.

If you would like to learn more about Richard Reeves work, you can contact him through the American Institute for Boys and Men.

If you would like to receive my free weekly newsletter with articles you can use to improve your mental, emotional, and relational health, you can do so here.

The post Why Men’s Mental Health is the Career Choice for the Future appeared first on MenAlive.

My father was a wounded angry man. When I was five years old he swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills believing his family and the world would be better off without him. Luckily he survived and was sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, but our lives were never the same again. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and how I could keep it from happening to other families. I am happy to say my father not only survived but thrived and I was able to share our story in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

            I swore I would never reach the point of despair that my father experienced, but after two failed marriages and a third one in trouble, I was feeling desperate and almost gave up. Luckily, my wife and I were able to learn how to transform our relationship. (See my welcome message at MenAlive.com, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor”).

            What helped us immensely was a book by Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. Over the years, Harville and Helen have become friends and colleagues and I’ve had the privilege and honor to interview them numerous times for my podcasts. Most recently I interviewed Harville on July 11, 2024.

            You can listen and watch our interview here.

            Our conversation ranged over many areas including our gratitude to the philosopher Martin Buber for his early work understanding human relationships and healthy dialogue.  In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet I talked about Buber’s contribution to humankind.

“In his book, I and Thou, Buber describes two kinds of human relationships, I-It and I-Thou. In relation to nature, ourselves, and God, I-It sees us as separate. Others are to be used for our benefit. I-Thou sees us as involved in a sacred relationship of communion. Others are to be respected and cherished.”

            As Buber says,

“Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou.”

In The Warrior’s Journey Home, I noted that for most of our human existence, for at least two-million years, humans lived in intimate connection with nature. It has only been relatively recently, in the last ten-thousand years, that we have moved from our relationship to nature as a partnership and come to see our role as one of control and domination.

            I quoted Joseph Campbell in his book, The Power of Myth, says

“The Indians addressed all of life as ‘thou’—the trees, the stones, everything.”

He goes on to say,

“You can address anything as ‘thou,’ and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a ‘thou’ is not the same ego that sees an ‘it.’”

            In my interview with Harville he said,

“Martin Buber was the first one since Socrates to do anything substantive on dialogue. When I-Thou was published in 1925, Buber was a conduit for a new way to be in the world. But Buber didn’t operationalize it, that was something that Helen and I have done with our work helping couples over the years.”

Safe Conversations and Quantum Connections

            Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D., began by asking,

“Why do couples fight?”

What they discovered led them to develop a simple process of taking turns talking and listening in a structured way that creates safety in relationships. They found it works in ANY relationship, and they began teaching workshops to share the life-changing process. Now they are bringing what they have taught couples how to do in improving their relationships to all the other areas of human life.

            At their website, Safe Conversations/Quantum Connections,  you can learn about how Harville and Helen intend to teach 2.4 billion people, in the next twenty-five years,  the simple practices that can literally save the world between now and 2050. They say,

“Quantum Connections brings the transformative power of Safe Conversations Dialogue Methodology and Tools to small businesses, large corporations, global communities, educational institutions, and community organizations, along with individuals, couples, and families.”

            In their newly released book, How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations, Harville and Helen say,

“Most of us have felt invisible, unheard, devalued, and disconnected at one time or another. The fact is that we are wired to connect. It is not something we can do or stop doing. We are connecting beings. It is our nature.”

            They go on to say,

“So why have so many of us experienced disconnection in recent times? We have become polarized politically and socially to the point that many feel they are invisible and vulnerable. In response, they go into self-protection mode and become defensive, because we all need to feel that we are valued and part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Why Healing Men is Important

            I have been working with men and their families for more than fifty years. My work focuses on men for a number of reasons. First, my own experience and studies from around the world show that males die sooner and suffer from major diseases at rates higher than those of females. Second, the more I’m able to help men, the better things are for women and children. Third, unhealed men pose a major threat to the well-being of all.

            The comedian Elayne Boosler captures this reality in a humorous and insightful observation.

“When women are depressed they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.” 

            Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present describes the danger that certain men pose to their country and the world.

“Ours in the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protection of democracy.”

            It is not by accident that each of the seventeen “protagonists” she describes in the book are male, including Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Putin, and Donald J. Trump.

“They use masculinity,”

says Ben-Ghiat,

“as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.”

            Richard V. Reeves, founder of The American Institute of Boys and Men, calls the upcoming U.S. election, “The Masculinity Election.” He goes on to say:

            “The 2024 vote was set to be a referendum on the rights of women. Instead it has become a debate over the needs and desires of men. The question now is which model of manhood will win in November. The macho brawler of the Trump-Vance ticket, or the kindly ‘girl dad’ offered by Harris and Walz? The fighter or the coach?”

            Reeves cites statistics showing a significant gender gap in voting intentions:

• Among likely women voters, Harris leads Trump by 14 points (55% to 41%) in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll while Trump leads by 17 points among men (56% to 39%).

• The gender gap among younger voters is especially stark, with women under 30 moving left while their male peers move right.

            My own work over the last fifty-plus years is that men desperately want and need the healing I found in a men’s group that teaches and practices the kind dialogue that Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt plan to bring to the world. Our group has been meeting now for 45 years and hopes to continue meeting for the rest of our lives.

            Truly we need a men’s health revolution and I look forward to working with Harville and Helen to help bring it about. You can reach Harville and Helen here. You can reach me at MenAlive.com and MoonshotForMankind.org.  

The post Healing The Wounded Angry Men of the World Using The Revolutionary Tools of Safe Conversations appeared first on MenAlive.

            My long-time friend and colleague, Steve Horsmon, founder of Good Guys 2 Great Men, invited me to speak to a group of guys who have been involved with their program for some time. He said in an email,

“Our topic is about the importance of CONNECTION. The men would love to hear what you think, feel, and advise around this topic specifically for men who are looking to improve their experience of life and to be more conscious in how they are living. I know you could talk for hours, but a 20-30 minute conversation with all of us would be fantastic.”

            As Steve knows I have been helping men and their families for more than fifty years. Trying to share something helpful in 20-30 minutes was a challenge. I began by sharing these thoughts. It has been said that the two most important days of our lives are the day we were born and the day we found out why.

            I was born on December 21, 1943 (for those who don’t want to do math that makes me 80+ years old). The day I found out why occurred November 21, 1969, the day I held our first son, Jemal, in my arms shortly after he was born. I made a vow to him that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully healed and involved with their families throughout their lives.

            I started working in what has become the field of gender-specific healing and men’s health shortly after I graduated with a master’s degree in social work from U.C. Berkeley in 1968 (I later went back to school and earned a PhD in International Health and did my dissertation research on men and depression, which was published as a book, Male vs Female Depression: Why Men Act Out and Women Act In.

            I write regular articles for those who subscribe to MenAlive.com and have written seventeen books including international best-sellers Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome. I offer private counseling for a few clients who need, and can benefit, from my unique skills and experiences. I also have created a number of self-guided courses including “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love,”  “Heal The Irritable Male Syndrome,” and “Healing the Family Father Wound.”

            I have found that there are six relationship successes that all men hope to achieve during their lifetimes. I said they all require a great deal of learning and support, which is why the first rule in my book, 12 Rules for Good Men, is “Join a Men’s Group.” Men don’t necessarily address these six issues in the same order I did and we often address each one multiple times in our lives before we achieve ultimate success:

• Becoming a Great Father.

            Whether we have biological children of our own, acquire them when we marry someone who already has children, or we mentor children in other ways, we must learn to be great fathers. For me it began immediately after Jemal was born. Up until then, my main focus was on work and my vision of being a great father began and ended with being a good provider and role model.

            But with Jemal’s birth, I took two weeks off from work and stayed home to connect with our son. I helped with diapers, feeding, and late-night rocking to help him to sleep. But I learned a life-lesson about being a dad when my wife decided she needed a break from mothering after Jemal was a year old and went on a week-long “vacation” with a girlfriend.

            Although I had practiced the basics, I always knew my wife was there and I believed that women had some special mothering gene built in to tell them what to do in every situation. I knew that men didn’t have that build-in wisdom. So when my wife left, I felt terrified. But when you are alone with a one-year-old, even for a week, you figure things out and I learned that neither females nor males have any genetic wisdom, but we can all learn to be great parents. I learned I didn’t have to parent like my wife. I just had to learn to do it my way.

            My wife and I now have six grown children (including an African-American daughter my first wife and I adopted when Angela was 2 ½ months old), seventeen grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. Our daughter has gifted us with a great deal of wisdom, including the challenging and beautiful realities of life and what it means to be a father, grandfather, and great grandfather to African American progeny.

• Finding Your Calling and Taking It to the Limit.

            I’ve learned that the old idea of “do what you love and follow your bliss” has serious limitations. My career and later my calling evolved over time and began with a promise I made to my children and had little to do with finding a job I loved. My first job was working with drug addicts. I created a residential treatment program called “Our Family.”  It is not too far fetched to recognize that my developing commitment and skill to be a great father translated to my work in the world.

            After five years founding and directing what became a successful residential treatment program for men and women with addiction problems, I applied for and was hired as one of first County Drug Abuse Program Directors, where I worked with local government and private sector community members to develop a whole range of programs in San Joaquin County.

            As my two children got older, I eventually joined a men’s group to get support for the stresses and strains of trying to balance being a great dad with doing work that was meaningful. My work has continued to evolve just as my children have grown and changed and both have been enriched by my men’s group.

• Connecting With Your Tribal Brothers.

            In Indigenous communities throughout human history when young boys reach a certain age, traditionally between age 10 and 12, they are taken from their mothers and are initiated into the world of men. Once they complete their initiation into manhood they go on to take their place in the tribe having been tested and successfully passed a test that allows them to feel confident in who they are.

            This group of boys and later men are forever bonded. They will eventually find a mate and have children of their own, but the bond they make as boys continues on throughout their lives. One of the great tragedies of modern life is that most of us have never been initiated into manhood. The result, as Robert Bly, describes in his book, The Sibling Society.

“This is not about siblings in a family,”

says Bly.

“We’ll use the word sibling as a metaphor, a lens, bringing into focus certain tendencies, habits, and griefs we have all noticed.”

            Bly goes on to address a problem of males who have never grown up and are perpetual children, though they appear to be adults.

“Adults regress toward adolescence and adolescents—seeing that—have no desire to become adults…Perhaps one-third of our society has developed these new sibling qualities. The rest of us are walking in that direction.”

            I found a different direction when I joined a group of guys following a one-day workshop led by the psychologist Herb Goldberg, author of the book, The Hazards of Being Male. Our group has been meeting now for many years and we’ve learned to become a band of tribal brothers. My wife, Carlin, says that the main reason she feels we have  had a successful 44-year marriage, is because I’ve been in a men’s group for 45 years. I wrote about our journey in my book, 12 Rules for Good Men.

• Finding and Keeping Your Soul Mate From Here to Eternity.

            The idea of finding our soulmate has become somewhat of a cliché, but it is very real in my life. If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” Carlin and I had both been married twice before and had children from our previous marriages when we met, fell in love, and eventually got married.

            Like all couples, we’ve had our challenges, not the least of which has been to learn to blend two families together and deal with our ex-spouses. She has been in women’s groups and my men’s group has been a great gift in helping me grow up and how to be a true partner in life.

            Last year, Carlin slipped on a wet sidewalk and broke her hip. The repair surgery was successful, but she suffered a stroke when her blood pressure dropped too low during the surgery. She is doing well, but we are both getting older. She is 86 and I will be 81 in December. The great gift of our long and beautiful relationship is learned to be caregivers as well as caretakers for each other as we face the challenges and lessons that are with us every day as we face the realities of disability and death as well as the joy of living every moment to the fullest while we are here.

• Standing Up To the Destructive Dominators When Your Time is Called To Act.

            My friend and colleague Riane Eisler wrote a powerful book some years ago called The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future, in which she describes two systems that have been part of human existence for the last ten thousand years:

            “The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking, rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model. In this model—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female—diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”

            Depending on what period of human history we are born into, we all must make decisions about whether we will go along with the crowd or stand up those in the world who would dominate and destroy.

            Being born in 1943 during World War II, I experienced the battle between freedom and partnership and a totalitarian model of domination that had occurred with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. I came of age when my own country got embroiled in Viet Nam and I became a war protestor. Most recently I recognized the dangers of a man who was voted out of office, but refused accept the election results, and now wants to be the next dominator-strongman.

            I first warned about the danger in an article published on May 7, 2016 titled “Why Donald Trump Will Be Our Next President.” Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned about the danger in her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, published in 2020. She said, “For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. They promise law and order, then legitimize law-breaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.”

• Becoming the Man You Were Meant to Be.

            Throughout our lives, each of the first five relationships help hone who we are as men. They help us become our true selves. From the moment of conception we have within us ancestral elements from a line of women and men (biologically, in the form of an X chromosome which we receive from our mothers and a Y chromosome we receive for our fathers). There are ten trillion cells in the human body and everyone is sex-specific, with either an XY set of chromosomes if we are male and an XX pair if we are female.

            Together, all six of these challenges determine whether we will be good enough men or great men. Most of us aspire to greatness but have struggled with one or more of these six challenges. We often seek “work-life balance,” but really tend to separate these six and try and attend to one while neglecting another.  

            But all are non-negotiable and we must find ways to attend to all six. I received guidance on how to do this from an unlikely teacher—an old Native American woman who was a master basket weaver. Here’s what she taught me. She described weaving a beautiful basket as being a metaphor for a full and successful life.

            Think of each of these six life challenges as one strand in the basket. It’s impossible to weave multiple strands at the same time; we need to attend to the strand that requires our attention without losing awareness of the others. Every strand will get our attention—just not all at the same time. I know I give attention to where I am most needed, knowing that I will then move on to the next strand when it attracts my attention. The basket holds my life as I strengthen individual strands. I’m no longer on a teeter-totter—I am weaving my life into something whole and lovely, powerful and meaningful.

            I hope you have found these ideas helpful. You can send your feedback to me at Jed@MenAlive.com. Come visit my websites, www.MenAlive.com and www.MoonshotforMankind.org

The post The 6 Relationship Successes Great Men Achieve: Which Ones Are You Missing? appeared first on MenAlive.