Why big boys don't cry | Gareth Griffith | TEDxUniversityofBristol

[Music] [Applause] [Music] it's an uncomfortable reality for all of us that our experience of the world is shaped by thoughts that we don't necessarily put into words I remember the first time I thought that I was in a house with my best friend at the time and I said something along those lines and I said isn't that crazy I just had I just had a thought something that had previously just been known in my mind but I just thought it in words and he said what and we went around in circles for a little while trying to trying to try to come across this idea of having ideas in your mind that you don't necessarily verbalize you don't necessarily have in words and actually we couldn't really get anywhere until I did this so this bit requires a little bit of audience participation you have to catch a ball safe all right catch first time a sit catch be did you at any point during that think the words that ball is gonna come down because of gravity right actually and so neither had my friend and I suspect neither did anyone else in here and I hadn't either at the time my point is that there are these things going on in our mind all the times all the time these things that are just facts for how the world works around us they're things we made up when we were kids and then we made them into rules and then those rules just became axioms of existence for us unquestioned and unquestionable now actually for some of us some stuff more damaging can then that can get into those kind of ideas for some of us something as damaging as you're a worthless person can get into that kind of axiom of existence where it's unquestioned and unquestionable in 2011 I tried to kill myself I'd spent many years wanting to and not I come close a couple of times and I hadn't because of fear or shame or guilt or cowardice or whatever you want to call that I was so utterly convinced of my own total lack of worth that Redemption was impossible I was a net negative influence on the world I was a bad person and I remember being so convinced of this that I found it really frustrating that my friends and my family still seemed to care about me and I remember thinking if I just had a switch on the side of my head or some Bionic press or some kind of et finger touch thing where I could just show them exactly what it was like to be in my mind they'd understand they'd understand how awful both I and my existence in this world were and not just understand they'd probably agree they'd say actually yeah that sounds like it's the best thing for you and that thundering overwhelming river of negativity and self-hatred coursing through your mind all the time is exhausting to try and hide hanging out with those friends and those family members when you're secretly pretending that you're fine but you wish that you didn't exist is unbelievably draining it shrinks your window of existence I couldn't think more than a couple of minutes ahead I live minutes a minute tangled in these webs of hypothetical scenarios in my head wondering why no one else seemed to be bothered by these things I remember reading an article on the BBC about a student suicide and wondering how it even made the news because this happens to everyone right all of this spiraled in my head over years and and formed these learned behaviors and neural pathways that compound over time and make it harder and harder to break out of these these traditions almost I couldn't contemplate getting better and I certainly didn't deserve to now I am aware there is something of a spoiler to that story even though I am here obviously alive telling you about how close I was to once not being right so evidently something did eventually change and that turning point for me was actually about a month after I tried to take my life and that that subsequent month was probably the worst of my entire existence I couldn't even do that in my mind I just failed at the one thing that I convinced myself was going to end the string of consecutive failings that have been my whole life until that point I struggle with these things now we still we still have these ideas that that we need to keep these things internalized we don't have space to talk about them for ourselves and I remember after I had this this moment this breakdown I was in my family home I cried for about two solid days I punched a mirror in my room it shattered everywhere I bled all over my floor and eventually my mum took me out for a drive and actually it took all of that stuff for us to realize that the world that my mum saw for me and the world that I saw for myself were two entirely separate things and I can remember that car ride even now I can remember the conversation almost word-for-word because it was the first time I'd ever tried to articulate any of this stuff any of what I've said to you and my overriding memory of that is of this intense pressure of this real crippling pressure that you get exactly one shot to articulate this to your mum in a car that you've not wanted to exist for the last five years and only you can explain it because only you are going through it I'm here to say that actually it's that last bit it's that pressure that is both problematic incredibly damaging and also entirely changeable let me take you back to that ball for a second I can remember exactly where I was the first time I thought the words I can't see my life going in any fashion other than one where I let down everyone I've ever loved or cared about it was about six months after that initial breakdown I've had a lot of talking therapy I've had a lot of conversations with friends and actually that was a huge huge moment for me because actually a couple of seconds after that was the first time I'd ever thought in my adult life maybe that won't be the case maybe I won't live a life where I let down everyone I've ever loved and cared about and I'd have never got to that stage where I could talk about these things where I could articulate these things in my mind where I could form these thoughts in words if I hadn't been able to talk about this with friends and with counselors and with doctors because talking about mental health is the single biggest thing I ever did in my recovery from all of this stuff it turns out they're talking about mental health is that switch that I was looking for on the side of my head it's not as easy as a switch it's definitely not as easy has taken me like six or seven years to get to this stage but you can learn it and ultimately it's the only way you get to compare mines with people I took a year out after I had that breakdown I took you around I lay on a sofa and I tried not to kill myself for a year and eventually I came back to my undergraduate geography degree and I asked my supervisor is there any chance I can do my dissertation on depression because it's basically the only thing I care about and rivers are really boring and he says he said yeah that's kind of fun but you're gonna have to teach yourself all those stats that you didn't turn up for I was like that give me a minute and so I did and it turned out that I was pretty decent as that turned I was actually pretty good at stats good enough to be offered a PhD in doing exactly that in looking at how we measure and how we define mental health across the UK using statistics and working out who is most at risk and it's during this PhD that this idea of being able to articulate your own suffering becomes really crucial and has real-world implications because my thesis is looking at self rated mental health across the UK that is going out and asking people how they feel and we do that with a batch of these statements we have positive statements and we have negative statements and we say do you feel good do you feel bad and then we combine them all into a score and that fundamentally is not just measuring people's mental health it's also measuring their capacity to talk about their mental health now as you may gather I am very very aware of the conversations I've had about my mental health but this is this is like looking at a distilled version of 250,000 people's mental health and the conversations they've had about theirs and actually in this research the overwhelming consensus is the people having the worst time in the UK right now are young unmarried white women and that is a really important finding and it's a really important finding for two reasons the first of those is that those people are obviously suffering and we should invest in them we should prioritize them in our policy government should step up and invest and put mental health on the map the second reason why that's super important and really interesting is that that's directly contradictory to what we tend to find when we look at so-called clinical measures of mental health stuff like suicides I suspect it isn't news to at least some of you in here that if you are a man in the UK and you are under the age of 45 your single greatest risk of death is suicide the same is true of ethnic minorities and migrants these are people who suffer a disproportionate burden of suicide but when we ask them how they're feeling they say fine and I'm not trying to speculate on who has the worst mental health here I actually suspect no one can answer that question objectively because we don't even agree on a definition I'm just here to highlight that difference that difference between those people at the real raw end of this stuff who can't articulate how they're feeling and actually this has real real-world implications the whole thing becomes even more interesting when you take the concept of well-being which is relatively recent in quantitative mental health literature so in that we tend to only remember these positive statements and negative statements if we take away the negative ones and we just ask people if they're feeling good in that then there's no difference between men and women so if there is some kind of stoicism if there is some kind of internal need to say that we're fine when we're not it's not expressed uniformly across all these things it's expressed and when we're asked if we're feeling bad we'll say that we don't feel good but we won't say that we feel bad and actually that means that we can't be confident when we were prioritizing who we should help with mental health funding with mental health research with mental health policy and it's overwhelmingly hammered home to me as an individual and as a researcher the being stoic saying that you're fine when you're not presents to everyone but you as just being better I think we actually have a societal problem when it comes to talking about feeling negative and that comes in the form of that stoicism it comes in the form of saying that we're fine when we know we're not we all hear these kind of ideas growing up of that sucks but it could be worse you don't get to feel bad because someone else has it worse at least you didn't grow up in a war-torn country at least you're not a starving child and obviously perspective is good but those ideas are actually pretty counterproductive because they can invalidate how people are feeling they can make them feel as though it's somehow not legitimate and I remember as a kid growing up things really hit home with me because my family my mom is from Zimbabwe they came over here in the 60s fleeing what was essentially apartheid conditions and so globally the opportunities and the privileges I have are not lost on me I'm were not lost on me as a kid and yet the fact that I dared to feel terrible given these undeniable global opportunities I had made me hate myself made me feel guilty made me feel selfish what right do I have and I still struggle with this sometimes but it turns out that actually the logic underpinning these things is fundamentally flawed because to say you don't get to feel bad because someone else has it worse is the identical logic to saying that you don't get to feel good because someone has it better and no one's saying that emotions aren't absolutes they're not binaries that whole kind of line of thinking implies that there are only two people in the world who get to feel good or bad and I've done a whole thesis on it now and I guarantee they do not know who they are we know that emotions don't work like that and these things are still internalized within us we also hear these ideas I'm sure you've heard them these notions of stiff-upper-lip or keep calm and carry on or keep your chin up or sometimes people chuck in gender and they're like the man up or big boys don't cry I'm here to say that those ideas are fundamentally flawed because they make people feel that their suffering is somehow not genuine that whole idea of not talking about suffering it's actually a reasonable coping mechanism until it's not until you go past this tipping point and you are in crisis and then it is the worst thing that you could have done because you have no way of articulating to anyone outside of that that you are in that zone it's a madness it's like if we were if we realized they were rising cancer rates no one would be advocating for less screening talking is our early warning mechanism for these cases it forces being stoic saying of a fine women not forced is coping into this false binary of coping totally fine and feeling the worst we've ever felt and what's worse and the reason that I suspect is perpetuated this long is that it's self-selecting because we all feel negative whether we talk about it or not so those people who are advocating for talking less for the stiff upper lip have undeniably been through some stuff they just have no idea how far along this they were how close they were to that crisis because they never spoke about it it's a bit like people who have no idea how well this could work for anyone else advocating that it should work for everyone despite not knowing how close they were to it not working for them I think of it a little bit like this if I took everyone in here and blindfolded you all and whisked you off in some kind of secret evil genius helicopter or something and I line you all up nine meters in front of the edge of a cliff you don't know there's a cliff there you've been blindfolded and I walk along the line of all of you and I give you all a number between one and ten and I tell you that's how many meters you're gonna have to walk it doesn't matter how long you take to do it but you have to walk it invariably some of you will fall off that cliff but then the most baffling thing happens which is how everyone who stays on the cliff starts turning around and chatting to each other about how blindfolds are the best thing ever and we should invest in blindfolds we should have more blindfolds for everyone I'm one of the people who fell off that cliff and I've spent quite a while getting back up it and now I'm back at the top ish now I'm back at the top ish I'm just here yelling screaming begging with all of you to take the blindfold off because that cliff is there for all of us I don't doubt that some of you in this room have been close to it felt close to it I don't doubt that some of you in this room have been close to it and not realised it was there but it's not worth discovering it's there by falling off it and we we like to entertain these notions that we maybe don't need to talk because we'd be able to spot it if it was in someone close to us we'd be able to work out that it was happening for them but no one spotted me and that's not because of negligence on any part I have an incredibly loving family I have very caring friends it's because I couldn't spot myself I didn't know I was unusual because no one else ever speaks about their mental health so if you're not going to talk about your mental health for yourself because you feel fine talk about it for someone else someone who may not be able to speak about it because they might realize that it isn't it for them because ultimately talking about your mental health you talking about your mental health is not just good for you it's good for everyone thank you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 8,495

Rating: 4.9391637 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Data, Death, Depression, Gender, Life, Men, Mental health, Recovery

Id: tLWEr_kdXl4

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2018