The Danger Zone

75% of Australian Suicides are male. 52% of Australian suicide are aged between 30 and 59. Why?

Nov 05, 2022

Illustrated Warning Sign of Danger Zone in White and Red Stock Illustration - Illustration of attention, danger: 172249895

I was involved in a conversation the other day that triggered a bit of a light bulb moment in me. I’ve wanted to talk about it since. I’ve entered the suicide danger zone. I’m a male in the 30 to 59 years age bracket. I’ve been sober for six and a half months. I’ve been journaling the entire time. I’ve been back working with my psychologist for maybe 6 weeks. I told myself I had to get sober to get to the bottom of my mental health issues once and for all after 15 years of half-arsed attempts or dodging them all together.

All this work is slowly starting to give me more clarity around my thoughts on these topics. A penny dropped for me the other day and I wanted to share my thoughts and theories and see what others thought.

I just want to preface this by saying I am in no way qualified to say what is and isn’t fact. So if at any point I sound like I’m trying to speak from a point of absolute certainty, I am not, and I apologise in advance. I am talking strictly from a lived experience point of view. From the moment a bloke is born, to the moment they find themselves in The Danger Zone and how they could get to a point where they seriously consider suicide.

So, the below is from the perspective of a blue-collar, middle-class Australian man. I am not speaking on behalf of anyone. This may well be just how I feel, as someone who is currently in this demographic. It’s purely what I think MAY contribute to SOME cases of suicide based on things I have been exposed to in my life.

Upbringing

From the moment we are born we are taught that being tough is good. When babies cry, we want them to stop. Not because we are trying to stifle their expression, but because babies only have one way of communicating with us initially. It’s pretty simple in a lot of ways when they cry, we have to feed them, burp them, and give them a hand to have a fart. change their ass or help them to sleep. Whatever the case, when they cry, we have to do one of the above to stop them from crying, in most cases. (when they’re sick it’s different but that’s not what we’re here for).

As young kids, the same applies. fall off your bike, hurt your knee, mum gives it a rub, a band-aid, maybe a milo, taps you on the arse, and sends you back out into the street. All better. It’s human nature. We want to stop our kids from feeling pain.

When kids are sad, the same applies. Of course, we don’t want our kids to be sad. Often, as adults, we struggle to relate to a kid being sad about another kid not sharing their connector pens with them. We think that’s silly. Don’t worry about it, use these crayons instead. Don’t worry about that other kid, he’s a bully anyway, etc etc. As blokes, we are fixers. We instantly want to fix things with logic and common sense. Which is great. But the more I learn about myself, the more I realise, there’s a lot of shit that can’t be fixed with logic and common sense.

The kid who is upset about the connector pen isn’t upset about the connector pen. They are upset because they built up the courage to ask another kid if they could borrow something of theirs, and they were rejected. Now the kid is thinking, what the fuck is wrong with me? They weren’t using the colour I wanted to use. I only wanted to use it for a little while. What is it about me that made that other kid not want to share? A child can’t communicate this though. So, they go to their parents, present the connecter pen paradox to their parents, and what do the parents do? They tell the child not to worry about it. Use a different option like a crayon, don’t worry about that kid.

The child had gone to the parents for reassurance that they matter. They needed to hear why the other kid didn’t share and why it didn’t mean they are a bad person. They needed to hear that sometimes some people don’t like to share their things, or that maybe one day the other kid shared something with someone else and never got it back, so they now have a no-sharing policy. Whatever the case, they needed on an emotional solution to an emotional issue, not a logical one.

This isn’t a dig at the parents of the time either. They only knew what they knew. They weren’t privy to the thousands of parenting books, podcasts, audiobooks, and websites that we are today. Our parents were raised by an even more emotionally shut-out generation than they are. In most cases, they are an improvement to their parents.

This is where it hurts. In doing what they believed to be the best thing for us, our parents kind of fucked us up. Because kids can’t articulate their feelings properly, every time they go to their parents with an emotional problem, a lot of parents don’t understand what the child is actually telling them or what they actually need. Every time they provide a logical solution for an emotional problem, we are taught that our negative feelings and emotions are fixed with material items, or we are told to simply not worry about that, it doesn’t matter, and we move on.

The don’t worry about/that doesn’t matter response is in my opinion, more dangerous. I might be slightly biased because this is where I sit in this whole thing, but when our words or more importantly our actions show our kids that their emotional needs aren’t important to them, what does it teach us? That our emotional needs simply are not important. Our brains develop the most in the first eight years of our lives. Often what we learn in these first eight years will stay with us for life. So if even by accident, we are taught in these first eight years that our feelings aren’t important, oftentimes we will believe that for the rest of our lives.

As we get older we start to push the boundaries our parents have put in place. So we get in trouble. A kid might punch his younger sibling. They might be sent to their room for the rest of the night. Go’n ya little shit, go and sit in your room on your own for the rest of the night like criminals do in jail. If it happens again, they may even get grounded! Now you can’t leave the house, for a fixed period of time. Like criminals in jail. At no point have the parents sat the kid down and explained why what they have done is wrong. They haven’t explained to the child why what they have done is wrong, they haven’t explained to the child the importance of empathy for their younger sibling and why it is important for the family unit that they apologise. All they’ve learned is that if you do the wrong thing, you have to sit in your room for a little while. If you do the wrong things a few times. You can’t leave the house for a little while. (also just quickly, jail doesn’t fucking work, so neither will punishing children the same way)

When we get older, we level up to the, if you do the wrong thing your parents are now allowed to fucking physically assault you. It’s fine though because you belong to them, they made you, and they’ll do what they want to you. So, same deal, kids are taught that you can do the right thing, you might just get smashed across the ass with a belt, wooden spoon, coat hanger, or whatever the fuck is within arms reach at that point in time. Essentially, by this point, we learn that if we muck up badly enough, violence is the final solution to all behavioral issues. Woohoo!

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that the way we were brought up was a real “us and them” type setup. It was never collaborative. In a period where we were supposed to be developing, trying new things, figuring out what we love, what we hate, and everything in between, we were constantly being dictated to. Told what to do, what to think. Not shown how to do things or how to think. We were taught that simple, lazy solutions are the best solutions. We are taught our feelings and emotions aren’t as important as everyone else’s. This manifests in low self-worth, low self-esteem, anxiety and most importantly internalising our thoughts and feelings. Why? Because we were taught that they are not important.

Early Adulthood

So we turn 18, and now we are fuckin’ MEN! We weren’t yesterday. Yesterday we were boys. Not now though! We’re tough and have pubes on our faces!

Sorry about that.

So we start going out. We discover alcohol (from the bottle shop, not out of our parent’s fridge or some dodgy bloke out the back of Lanyon Shops). We start going out to pubs and nightclubs. It’s a whole new world. We’re a generation of kids with low self-esteem and anxiety issues. What better thing to do than densely jam them all into one spot and fill ‘em up with a depressant like alcohol? Just for good measure, scatter some pills and various powders around the place. THEN! Let’s get all vitriolic when they start fighting each other. Remember, our parents taught us violence is the answer to solving problems when people do things we don’t like!

Drugs and alcohol give us the confidence to let out all the feelings we’ve been suppressing all of our lives. This is why some people cry every time they get drunk for the first year or so. I did. For others, it might manifest in violence and anger. It’s not Bundaberg Rum, it’s a lifetime of suppressed emotions because they were never taught how to build healthy mechanisms to process these emotions. For some, it’s a little darker. For others, drugs and alcohol take all the anxiety away, temporarily. This was also me. I remember drinking the first beer on a Friday afternoon after a long, shitty week at work and literally having a physical feeling of euphoria in my body, It was like my anxiety were pieces of kindling and the beer was molten lava. As it worked my way through my body the anxiety would just vanish in a puff of smoke. Drugs would do the same, but they also meant I could drink for longer! That’s why it was so hard for me to stop drinking once I had started. I had carried this kindling around all week. It got heavier and heavier all week, so to finally feel that weight gets lifted, whatever it was that removed that weight, I wanted more and more of it. It felt too good.

The problem here is, that drugs and alcohol don’t actually reduce anxiety. It doesn’t go anywhere, you just can’t feel it while you’re under the influence. So when the substances wear off, you’re left with even more anxiety than you had when you started drinking. This is where self-medicating starts. Often people don’t even realise that they have anxiety. They just know that they feel better under the influence than not under the influence.

So each day they come home from work and have a few beers, or whatever. They start to build a tolerance, so gradually a few beers won’t do what they used to. So it becomes a few more, and a few more. You get the point. This is the beginning of addiction. It happens because we don’t know how to process our emotions. Substances take us out of our own heads temporarily. The more we use them, the more our ability to process those emotions wains, and the more dependent we become on them to take them away. The problem is, they don’t deal with these emotions, they just push them further and further back into our heads. As our heads fill up, we need more of the substance to keep pushing them back. But one day, we’re going to run out of room. That’s when these emotions will come out and we won’t have any control over how they manifest. The other thing is, these substances are physically bad for you. They are unhealthy. Some of them are physically addictive too. Like Alcohol and opioids. In serious cases of alcohol and opioid addiction, you can’t just go cold turkey or you risk dying from withdrawal. So when people in these situations try to get sober, not only do they struggle with the cravings,m but they experience a physical pain that can only be suppressed by the substance itself. This is why heroin addicts have been prescribed morphine.

Anyway, I’ve gone a little off-topic there. The point is, we hit early adulthood, and get exposed to this big wide world, and some people start their struggles with addiction here and potentially struggle with it for the rest of their lives. Adding another layer of difficulty, stress, and anxiety to their day-to-day lives.

Through this period we experience a lot of pressure. We want to move out of our parent’s house and be independent. Our parents want us out of the house too. But they’re also telling us we need to save for a house. Ok so move out, pay rent and bills, but don’t live in a share house with my mates even though that’s the cheapest option because they could be a bad influence in terms of partying, so rent my own place, pay more per week than what the mortgage would be on the same place, but also save for a house deposit, on apprentice wages? Got it!

We’re expected to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives at 18 years old. We might get two years through an apprenticeship and decide we hate it, but we’re told to stick it out, get your trade then do something else. Ok no worries, I’ll just put up with another two years of fucking torture, getting paid less than the laborer who started yesterday,m to get a qualification I will never use ever again. Why the fuck would anyone do that?

Early adulthood is a very stressful time. There is pressure fucking everywhere. You want all the cool shit your mates have. You want a good job. You want an SS Commodore Ute, even though they’re completely impractical for carrying your gear around. They’re loud and the boys think you’re cool if you have one. You want to do all the right things to appease your parents. You want to impress girls. Every time you don’t succeed at one of these things, you get down about yourself. I’m not as good as old mate over there because his ute is faster than mine, or his apprentice wage is slightly higher than mine, or that bloke’s parents gave him a hand buying a house and mine didn’t. Later we realise that all this stuff wasn’t worth getting wound up about and makes you sound like a spoiled little bitch. But at the time it’s fucking important to you. It means everything. Most importantly though, You’re getting worse and worse at processing your emotions. You’ve never been good at it anyway, but now you’re drinking, might be doing drugs, going to the gym, whatever you can do to avoid feeling them. The longer you avoid the process the worse you’re going to get at them.

The Great Fuckin’ AuSTRAYIN Dream, Mate

Eventually, you meet someone. You like them. You think they’re alright. Then you like them, then you love them. Your goals align. You start to settle down a little. You finish your apprenticeship, uni, TAFE, start your career, and get the first rental that you don’t share in with two or three other equally or more so disgusting excuses for human beings.

You start to get into a bit of a routine. Work every day, come home, cook dinner together, you might even get yourselves a dog that you treat like a human child because you want to pretend to be a real family but you’re not ready for something you can’t re-home if it doesn’t work out.

It’s fuckin’ hard work but slowly you start saving your arse’s off together to get a place of your own. You’re introduced to this disturbing concept called a “shared bank account”. At first, you scoff at the idea, but then you realise you’re a weapon on the piss and you could use some help controlling your budget. So, you sacrifice a lot. Work hard, over time, weekends, cashies, whatever, because you have an aligned goal to buy you’re only little house. This is good. Sensible, mature, teamwork, wank wank.

You buy your first house. You save for fucking years for your house, sacrificed heaps. No footy trips, boys trips, fishing trips, festivals, whatever the fuck cool young guys do now. So after all those years of sacrifice and hard work you move into your very own little shit hole. You just dropped about ten years’ wages on the cheapest house in the suburb. Cool.

Now you have the home, you have mum pressuring you to “make her some grandbabies”. You want to tell her to fuck off, but she’s your mum. She’s done a bit for you. Don’t be a cunt to your mothers. But, “The Misso” jumps on the bandwagon, it’s time to fill your very own little shit hole with mini people who shit themselves. Initially, it was fun and exciting. You have sex all the time. How good! But as the months tick by and you’re struggling to get pregnant, you start to stress. What the fuck is wrong with me? You consider getting your shit checked out to make sure you can even get pregnant. Even though it’s completely common to take over twelve months to get pregnant, you still find it hard to accept that there is nothing wrong with you. Sex isn’t fun anymore, it’s a chore. It’s scheduled relative to where your partner is on her cycle. You feel pressure. Pressure to get her pregnant. It starts with you! If you can’t get her pregnant it is your fault. That’s bullshit by the way but it’s how you feel at the time.

Eventually, you get pregnant. You go to all the appointments. It’s exciting! Look at the little yellow gremlin floppin’ about on the computer monitor. Get a bunch of photos, and chuck ‘em on Instagram to let everyone know you’re pregnant. Now that people know, there’s pressure to get through to the end without any mishaps. Again, you know the twelve-week rule, once you pass your first trimester of pregnancy, it would take something pretty drastic to prevent you from having a healthy baby.

You have the baby. It’s beautiful. It’s honestly the greatest thing that has ever happened to you. Life is changing, for the better. The most significant moment in your life so far. You take a fortnight off work. You spend it staring at your sleeping baby in absolute amazement. It’s actually the fucking best. Buuuut, eventually you have to go back to work. Of course, you do. Your money has never ever been so important. Maternity leave doesn’t pay the same as her work usually does, obviously. More pressure. Your life changes completely. You work all day, come home, and it’s not like it used to be. It’s better but very different. You start going to the gym in the morning instead of afternoons so that you can help of the afternoon. So you’re up earlier, it’s the only time you feel like you have to do something for yourself. You get home from work, your partner needs a break from the baby, you walk in the door and before you can do anything you have a crying baby in your arms oh, and by the way, it has a shitty nappy (just on that, change ya fucking baby’s nappies. If you’re a bloke who refuses to change nappies, you’re a piece shit). It’s full-on, it’s fast-paced, but, it’s fucking awesome. It’s just a little hard.

You decide you love the little prick so much you want to give it a sibling. But the little shit hole that you’ve recently renovated isn’t big enough for the three of you, the dog, and another kid. So, you have to upgrade. But how will you support another mouth and a bigger mortgage? Especially when you’re staring down the barrel of another twelve-month maternity leave period. So you start to take work a little more seriously. You get there early, stay back late, and start taking on a leadership role. Maybe you ramp up the cashies and get to a point where you can go out on your own. Before you know it you have a better job, making more money, maybe a phone, car, and fuel card. How good. But while you were focused so strongly on the financial benefits, you forgot that the new role would require more of your time but more importantly, more of your mental energy.

So now you have the new bigger house, and a job that helps you pay it off, but you have more kids, less time, and less mental energy to spend at home. Got a sweet fuckin’ house though and you can tell your mates that you never see that you have an important job title and a business card. You might even change your phone voicemail to one where you say who you are and who you work for! Very impressive.

These are all choices that we voluntarily make at the time. They’re all good things. Kids are amazing, more money is great, and having more responsibility at work makes you feel better about yourself. We make these decisions based on necessity at the time. We convince ourselves we can do it and that it will make things better, and for the most part, they do. But while each and every one of them can improve your quality of life significantly, they all come with their exclusive stressors and anxieties. Anxieties we haven’t yet learned to deal with.

The Danger Zone

So, you’ve fuckin’ made it. All that hard fucking work has paid off. You’ve got the family home, and the family to fill it, your partner is back at work and the kids are in daycare or school. By this point, You’ve been in your more senior role at work for long enough for it to be pretty easy for you. This is where life should finally start to settle down a bit. You’ve achieved all these big goals you’d set out to achieve. From the outside looking in, your life is perfect. You’re doing so well, you’re even thinking about buying a caravan or a camping trailer. Maybe an investment property! How good.

For most, this is where life is at its best. But for some, this is where it goes downhill…

Why? Well, here’s my theory…

Up until this point, you’ve been so busy. You’re building your empire. You’re driven. You need to provide. You need better shit than your mates. You need a fuckin’ jetski!

Anyway, remember back when we were kids and we were taught our emotional needs were unimportant? So we just kind of believed that. We always put others first. We became fixers on other people’s problems and neglected our own. We may have even learned what advice to give others in a time of need but never been able to apply that same advice to our situation. Anyway, those emotions, feelings, thoughts, they’re still there. Our inability to process them is still apparent. But something has changed…

We no longer have as much “stuff “ to throw ourselves into. The kids are getting more and more independent every day. They are playing on their devices, or with other kids in the street. You’re too old to play organized sports anymore. Plus you were too busy when you were establishing yourself at work whilst having a young family to commit to the club anyway. So you may have been out of the sport for a little while now. This is the life you always thought you wanted. All those long days, and shitty nights of sleep, were all a trade-off for this time now. But you’re not happier. You’re actually less happy.

This is because you never dealt with emotional problems. You went to the gym instead. You did overtime instead. You coached the kid’s footy team instead. You did just about any fucking thing that you could to do in place of it. And why wouldn’t you? These feelings are horrible, and you’re terrible at dealing with them, so subconsciously we force ourselves to be busy doing shit we have convinced ourselves is important so we don’t have to think about this shit.

As we get older, our physical energy level drops away and we no longer have the energy to maintain all the things we were using as avoidance techniques. Physically we are tired. But these unresolved issues you’ve been pushing back by being busy are getting stronger and stronger as you’re ability to avoid them gets weaker.

This is when people have a mid-life crisis. This is when people (like me) start talking about selling everything, buying a farm, and living in a fucking yurt. Fully self-sustainable. #FuckTheSystem. This is because, as we run out of these physical coping mechanisms for our emotional problems we start to realise something. All this material shit, all the things you thought would make you happy, they don’t. You realise you’ve worked your ass for them, you’ve stressed yourself near to death for it. You’ve fought with loved ones and hindered relationships for it. You start to wonder why you didn’t have the balls to pursue your passion as a career when you were younger, instead of doing the qualification that your dad told you to get. You realise your work, while you’re successful at it, means fucking nothing to you. It pays well, and it’s easy enough, but it doesn’t fulfill you. You start to think, “was it really worth it?”

So what do you do? this is the tricky part.

I think from here people can go one of two ways. You can take the negative route. Get bitter, Resent your family for not appreciating your sacrifice, even though it’s not their fault. You’re actually mad at yourself for thinking all this bullshit would make you happy. You might find solace in a substance, a little too much solace. Whatever you do, these feelings you’ve been pushing away forever are bubbling away and on the boil. They’re coming. And if you don’t find a bigger pot, or a ladle to scoop some boiling water out, it’s going to boil over.

Alternatively, you could do something positive. You could reach out to someone. Anyone. A psychologist, a friend, a stranger, a neighbor, ring a fucking sex line and tell them if that’s how you need to do it. Speak to fucking someone.

Get involved in the community. Join a running group, a knitting group, a local men’s shed, the fuckin’ CWA, whatever. You need to find a positive outlet.

So why do I think this is a potential path to suicide?

Because we need a sense of meaning and purpose. We have spent our lives believing that material items, qualifications, and having more shit than our mates, are our meaning and or purpose. We’ve always used a logical solution to an emotional problem, never really solving the emotional problem. All of a sudden we are in our 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and we realise we are unhappy, unfulfilled, and discontent. We start to stress that we have wasted our life. But we feel stuck.

We can’t consider a career change. We have the mortgage on the big house that the family love. We have repayments on the jet ski. Plus, we have ingrained in ourselves that our problems don’t matter as much as other people’s. So, we will go without because we can’t bear the thought of putting ourselves first in the place of someone else, even one time. We think we are being stoic by sacrificing ourselves for others. So, even after we realise that the life we have created for ourselves makes us unhappy, we feel as though we can’t change it. We have been taught to be grateful. We have been taught that all this shit we bought is what we should be grateful for. How dare we be unhappy in a nice home with a nice car in the garage! That would make you ungrateful!

So, some of us just do nothing about it. Because we don’t understand our negative emotions, we don’t even know how to identify them. We don’t even know that we are upset. This shit builds up incrementally in the background, because we ignore it, remember. It’s not until it’s so fucking big that we can’t ignore it anymore that we notice it. By that point, it’s too big. There isn’t much we can do about it either. We can’t go to the doctor’s because we’re a bit sad! How embarrassing! So, we just get on with it.

We chip away and chip away just kind of waiting to one day wake up happy because we think that all this physical hard work we have done will one day make us emotionally happy. We don’t understand that it hasn’t, doesn’t, and never will. We were never taught that. We were taught to be tough. So, we are what we think is tough. We just deal with it. Except we don’t.

We just keep on ignoring it like we’ve been conditioned to do. Even as it gets worse, even as we see more and more mental health awareness get spruiked on TV. That shit’s for other people, not me, it wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t be depressed. I’ve got a fuckin’ jet skit, that I’m too miserable to enjoy. Yet still, we ignore it, until we can’t ignore it anymore and try to solve an emotional problem with a very permanent, practical solution.

If you block your toilet, you don’t call a bricklayer. You call a plumber. Emotional problems, emotional solutions.

What Would I Know?

Look, I know I’m not an expert. I know I might be wrong here. I’m happy to be. I know that some people are born with a predisposition to mental health conditions. But I also know that trends suggest certain demographics are more susceptible to mental health issues than others.

But I think the above is a legitimate theory because I feel or have felt a lot of these things myself. Luckily, I think (and hope) I have caught it at the right time and I stay on the trajectory I have been since my breakdown at Easter led me to sobriety and back into psychological work with professionals.

Whatever the case, fellas, fellette’s(?), please, talk to someone if you need to. Keep an eye on those close to you, often the people closest to someone will notice the changes in their behavior before they will. There’s still a heap of us out there who were raised this way. This problem is far from over. It’s genuinely going to take a generation until this bullshit stoic attitude runs its course. Until then we have no choice but to be vigilant, honest, and open. We owe it to the people we care about and the people who care about us.

Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14

Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222

NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511

Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467

Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78

Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800

I’m tired.

Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Twitter @sbrngthghts

Cheers Wankers.