Romeo and Juliet is one of my favourite plays because, although it was written 400 years ago, there are so many echoes of issues that are relevant today - including male mental health.
At the start of the play, Romeo shows behaviour we might now connect with depression: his father describes his son’s tendency to draw “the shady curtains from Aurora’s bed” and “Away from light…private in his chamber pen himself”. Then, out of nowhere and with the kind of behaviour observed in the manic episodes well known to people with bipolar disorder, Romeo declares his intention to marry Juliet within just a few hours of meeting her.
Soon, he shows a lack of self-control and his anger drives him to kill Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. Then, hearing that the murder of Tybalt has earned him banishment from Verona, Romeo seeks out his friend, Friar Lawrence.
When Romeo breaks down before him, hysterical with grief at his belief that he will never see Juliet again, Friar Lawrence, in a shocking display of misogynistic behaviour, asks Romeo, “Art thou a man?” and tells him, “Thy tears are womanish”.
It isn’t long before Romeo kills himself. So, if we fast-forward more than 400 years from when Romeo and Juliet was published in 1597, not a lot has changed. Disturbing parallels remain between the thoughts of a 16th-century playwright and the reality of 21st-century Britain: still, young men are angry; still, young men are chided for expressing their emotions; still, young men are killing themselves.
Around three-quarters of suicides in the UK are male, and although the overall rate has dropped, it has risen in males over the past four years.
Suicide is the biggest killer, above heart disease and cancer, of males under the age of 40, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Stonewall figures show that nearly two-thirds of gay and bisexual men have thought about taking their own life, while data from the Scottish Public Health Observatory shows that males from the most deprived areas of society are twice as likely to die from suicide as their peers born in the most affluent areas.
My own journey with mental health has been told through my social media and, for me, a large part of my communication and openness about it is to prevent Romeo’s fate from becoming my own.
As a gay man under 40, who came from a single-parent family on a council estate and had a number of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), I fall into a lot of the categories above.
In May 2018, I’d had an amazing weekend with my partner and friends: I’d laughed, made good memories and was generally happy. However, I suffer from anxiety, and when I got home, I found a recorded delivery note from the Royal Mail saying they’d tried to deliver a letter while I was out. That note led me to try to take my own life.
Now, you might think “what an overreaction” but the fact is anxiety does this to you. My mind went into overdrive thinking what this letter might say (as it turned out, it was nothing to worry about - it was from the council about my guttering - but, because I didn’t know that at the time, I thought the worst). I created huge stories in my head of what the letter contained and, as it was a bank holiday weekend, I couldn’t get them to redeliver the letter straightaway, and so did not sleep for almost two days, worrying.
My final thought before taking an overdose was this: I’m exhausted of being exhausted.
People might have looked at my life on paper and thought I should be happy - a teacher, with a good social life, a good wage, a partner and so on - but I was hiding it all behind a fake smile. I kept my growing sense of fear from those who loved me the most because I was scared - scared that they would think I was weak, being dramatic or crying wolf. I had thought of suicide for a long time.
In Scotland, we have a drive on ACEs and making sure we are a trauma-informed country. I have always felt everyone should practice empathy and tolerance because you never know what others have gone through.
As an adult who went through adverse childhood experiences, I was passionate about doing all I could to understand how I could support the young people in my classroom who were going through trauma. But what I was unprepared for was that this would be a trigger for my own mental health problems.
It is sometimes said that traumatic reactions are normal reactions to abnormal situations. As true as this statement is, it’s also true that individuals’ coping reactions post-trauma remain poorly understood, even by many of the people who are in the best positions to offer support and treatment to trauma victims.
It is important for everyone to understand that victims of traumatic events, such as childhood abuse, will not always react or behave in the way that we might expect.
My work on ACEs was double-edged - on the one hand, I was learning a lot about how I could support young people experiencing trauma and helping my staff be more trauma informed. On the other hand, I was learning about myself and the long-term impact of my own childhood.
The support for teaching staff going through mental-health difficulties is, in my opinion, poor. It feels, at times, like putting a plaster over a bullet wound. It varies from council to council but, with mental health still having a negative stigma attached to it, it makes it difficult for adults to seek help for issues.
The Time for Talking service is available, but counselling is specific and needs a connection that is hard to achieve over the phone. Waiting lists for other services are high and leaders in schools aren’t trained to deal with complex issues surrounding mental health.
This all needs to change in order to support staff who are supporting our young people. Health and wellbeing is the responsibility of all in teaching and, if it’s expected of teaching staff, then it should be expected of everyone, from those in educational leadership to support staff. We need to intensify educational efforts to expand the availability of trauma-informed care, which means treating a whole person, taking into account past trauma and the resulting coping mechanisms when attempting to understand behaviours and treat the person.
My experience has been mixed. I have had some great support relating to being given time to seek professional help, but I found that the absence from work was a trigger and that back-to-work conversations also triggered my anxiety (do those creating the policies know how mental health works?).
When I did go back to work, I was given space to breathe but was also aware that people were still uncomfortable using the word “suicide” around me. For me, having frank and honest discussions about mental health is the most important method to support us, to get people to understand and, in turn, to support our young people as they move into adulthood.
The topic of mental health is, by definition, very complex. However, as the issue is becoming more prominent in our society - and educators are often the first to notice mental-health problems - we must find ways to protect ourselves and build support systems with people we value.
We need better advice and the space to change, grow, make decisions and even make mistakes. We need people who listen to you and share with you, and let you freely express your feelings and emotions without judgement or criticism.
People need to participate in their own treatment decisions. As an educator, I have educated and informed myself, and engaged in looking after my mental health. For me, the key thing has been communicating openly and honestly about my mental health-related issues.
Children in Scotland ran a conference in August called The Psychology of Gender and Why It Hurts: Suicide and Boys. I was honoured to be asked to chair this event.
We heard from experts in psychology, sociology and gender studies in order to better understand the issues facing boys and young men that might lead to suicidal thoughts and feelings. One speaker, for example, was the University of Glasgow’s Professor Rory O’Connor, who recently co-published research which showed that those who had attempted suicide were more likely to have a family member or friend who had self-injured or attempted suicide, and were more impulsive. The study also found that further research to test predictors of suicide is “crucial” to inform interventions to prevent suicide attempts.
We looked at how well boys and young men are served by suicide prevention-related policy and practice, and at the effectiveness of messages from a range of sources to “seek help” and “talk about feelings”. The event promoted discussion and the opportunity to network with others in the children’s sector, and was a huge step forward in looking at how we support young men in our care so that they don’t become a statistic waiting to happen.
So, my own journey continues. I am in a good place. I have learned so much about adverse childhood experiences, I have learned how to support myself, that communication is key, that the notion of “happiness” is, in fact, not on social media but in the moments we create in the here and now, and that everyone must practice empathy and tolerance.
We all have a responsibility to do more in our support of the young men and boys in our care: to model emotional openness, to talk about suicide appropriately, to look at the language we use, and to instil belief that talking about their feelings and emotions is key to their long-lasting mental wellbeing.
John Naples-Campbell is a principal teacher of expressive arts in Aberdeen and longtime campaigner for LGBT rights in education and beyond. He was one of Tes Scotland’s 10 people of the year for 2018 and tweets @JNaplesCampbell
This article originally appeared in the 13 SEPTEMBER 2019 issue under the headline “Don’t let men suffer in silence”
Already a subscriber? Log in
