onthebeach

Your comment indicates you seem determined to see the worst in people, especially women for some unfathomable reason. I made the caveat very clear that my earlier comments did not relate to clinical depression as opposed to short term experiences of melancholy or event based depression. I clearly distinguished between the two.

Indeed, my discussion with Poirot had headed away from the original topic to a more broader one relating to human behaviours in the context of that earlier caveat.

Please do not accuse me of blaming sufferers of depression for their state. This is not at all what I wrote and unlike you I don't see women and men as different in terms of worth, respect or regard. Please do not judge others worldviews using your own resentful attitudes towards women as a benchmark.

If you do find my comments not to your liking or you take pleasure in wilfully misinterpreting to satisfy your own self-fulfilling prophecy about women, please feel free to ignore and not respond. Life is too short for this sort of ill-will I am certainly too old to bother with this sort of trolling.

onthebeach,

Please produce the post where I stated that depression could be cured by going fishing?

Of course, I shouldn't have expected you to get my point. I shouldn't have expected you to fathom the fact that a book ostensibly about "fishing" isn't only about "fishing" at all, but something much deeper and more valuable - and that our harried modern life of excess is the chief cause of depression.

That a book like The Compleat Angler points in the direction of an opposite paradigm - something more conducive to our humanity.

That you should take a simplistic swipe because you're incapable of anything but a shallow interpretation is certainly more of a problem for you than it is for me.

My response to onthebeach sounded more hot headed than intended.

Poirot
I experienced a bout of depression after a series of personal experiences. Your comments resonate well and should not be diminished in the context of our discussion.

One of the major aspects that helped was accepting what you cannot change and to even forgive those who were responsible (well in truth I am not quite there yet). It was also about looking outside the system as you put it and making choices about when to participate within it and when not - taking charge so to speak.

I must add the caveat that this was not clinical depression and I chose not to take medication

Pelican,

Thanks for that - as you know, the older I've become, the more I've tended to try and cruise in this life, step outside the square, so to speak and move at my own pace. Not always achievable, but I try.

onthebeach seems to have a morbid dislike for women, and will choose any opportunity to twist a post's meaning to suit his agenda.

When he stops doing that, he'll receive a tad more respect from moi.

: )

The OP proposed a site for men. It is appropriate to reflect on research that appears to question the Man Therapy approach. I did quote some of that research earlier. As far as I can see from the responses here, there is no advice superior to that research recommendation (quoted) and it questions the thinking behind Man Therapy.

'I'd be prepared to stick my neck out and say that major depressive episodes (not illnesses) are nearly always reactive in some way'

I can agree I think. As a teen it was fed to me and I swallowed it (literally in pill form) that I just had a 'chemical imbalance', but older and wiser there really were some f$cked up family dynamics. I'm sure most families are the same, which is why I think Poirot's external societal factors are over-sold. Kids think their families are normal, and they get a lot of their ingrained beliefs from them much more than from society.

'I hope that the incoming government does something for men that isn't just a vehicle for someone to make money by doing an insultingly puerile set of advertisements.'

Well there's funding actual services, and making sure those services are effective, and there's 'raising awareness'. Which is easier? Which is more visible?

There is a disconnect anti, but the break in the chain could well be you and I disconnected from mainstream society, not the government and advertisers. Trying to appeal to a fringe group by use of mainstream memes is doomed to failure I suppose.

I think it's inevitable that in a society and biology where we have a deeply ingrained idea that men are expendable, more men will suicide.