Campaign Against Living Miserably

Young men are killing themselves at an alarming rate.

Male suicide rates are consistently higher than female. A man takes his own life every three hours in England and Wales.

Being a young man can be a lonely, miserable experience particularly if you don't have the means to distract yourself. Women of all ages are generally more used to discussing their feelings and problems and have networks of other women who can help them through difficult times. Having children helps women grow up, take responsibility for themselves and engage with life, even if that means just getting up in the morning, feeding their child and themselves, getting them to and from school. By comparison, many men don't take responsibility for themselves.

The majority of men drink alcohol at a level that could be harmful to their health. In 2005, 35% of men exceeded the recommended daily limit (four units ) at least one day during the previous week. A further 19% drank more than eight units, double the recommended daily limit.

This isn't a value statement but one of truth for a great many men, which is one reason why they still die before women particularly if they are poor.

Men who are defined as partly skilled or unskilled have a far lower life expectancy. In 2005, the last year for which such comparative data is available, life expectancy at birth for men in social class 1 was already 77.7 years (higher than the average for all men today). For those in Social Class V, it was just 68.2 years.

The Campaign Against Living Miserably is a charity set up by men for men. This is important. It recognises that men are not women and that there are important cultural differences.

Many mothers and female partners manage the health and wellbeing of men, a paradoxical situation which recognises that many men will not take responsibility for themselves and denies them the opportunity to do so. Men are further distanced from their own cultures and from themselves. Most counsellors, nurses, social workers, teachers, most of the professionals that boys and men in Britain come into contact with are women, and whilst there's no doubt that a masculine agenda still dominates every sphere of public life and most areas of private life it's an old truth that patriarchy hurts everyone, women and men.

From Feckless Oiks To Malingering Liars.

As the focus shifts from feckless oiks to malingering liars take a look at Bendy Girl’s blog

Note the title.

There are a lot of excellent links to other disability pages on Bendy Girl’s page, in particular But You Don’t Look Sick offers one persons first hand account of being disabled.

In some developing countries people who are fit to work but who can earn more from begging will mutilate themselves or their children, knowing that the more obvious their disability the more money they will receive from charitable strangers. Of course, the terribly ill are unable to beg and disappear which is why religious institutions and later the State decided that a more collective approach to care would be less grotesque. And still we expect the ill to perform to prove how ill they are, sometimes to us and more often to someone from ATOS Healthcare the company which interviews people who need disability benefit. They’re notorious for their abuse of power.

There’s a great deal of information in these few webpages and they give some indication of the complexity of the system that a person who is physically ill or disabled must contend with. The person with a mental illness, who can indeed take a pen from a pocket, turn on a tap and sit for 30 minutes but will be entirely unable to work within the employment culture we have now has particular problems with a system that doesn’t welcome people in wheelchairs, let alone a hidden illness.

MIND offers analysis.

along with the LSE

Context Is Everything

A man is hanging out of the windows of the block across the road, he’s quietly telling a couple of children which door to go to and what to say. One the children, polite, neat and apparently confused, goes up to a door, looks back over his shoulder towards the man and says: “Is this the one?” I don’t hear any answer but the child raises his voice and says: ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Do you live here?’ to the person going into the block. She doesn’t answer and the children wander off, back towards the other block where the man says: ‘See that car? Yes, that blue one, that’s it. Spit on it. Spit on it.’ The children, confused enough now to feel fear, walk away.

The man continues in his low, not unfriendly tone. ‘I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you. Oh, is that how it is now? Don’t you love me any more? I want to fuck you.’ My neighbours’ adult daughter comes into our block and we say hello. “Do you know that man?” I ask. She doesn’t, but he somehow knows her name and she’s more bemused than aggrieved. She goes inside, I carry on gardening, the man continues his monotone commentary. The children have long gone.

My daughter and I are walking home and we hear a cacophony of bird noises then see a blackbird fly out of a bush. There’s a nest in there with a second brood of fledglings and I take my daughter over to see it, high up above our heads in the municipal bushes. We listen to the young birds then hear an outraged: “Do you mind?” We can’t work out where it’s coming from, and again “Do you mind? I’m trying to go to the toilet.” And there, 4 feet from us squatting behind the large communal bins is a woman with her skirt pulled up around her hips. I am so shocked that I can’t find the urge or the words to reply and just leave, with no sense of threat but with the feeling that I’ve moved into a Kafkaesque world where squatting, shitting women are outraged that I’ve interrupted their public ablutions.

Across the road there’s a camper van, one of the cheaper ones and very old. The locks aren’t any good and a group of 10 year olds has broken into it. They throw everything out of it onto the street, bedding, pots and pans, a television, reams of paper, tea towels, everything. Then they cross the street and begin ripping a young pear tree apart, bending it under their combined weight, screaming loudly and intensely until the tree suddenly snaps and they land heavily. One boy is hurt and they begin to kick him. He has to get up or be beaten, staggers to his feet, laughs, throws a punch which misses and the lot of them move off down the street, leaving the road covered in the strangely unsettling contents of someone’s holiday life and the young tree. A number of us called the police who never arrive.

A family just up the road allowed their two elder children to smoke dope when they were 12 and 14 years old. The parents often went away leaving the three children alone, the youngest being 10, and they would have parties in which alcohol and illegal drugs contributed to the house being trashed, time after time. The 15 year old daughter started a relationship with a 30 year old whom her parents welcomed into the home and he tattooed her at 16 with her parents consent. On a school exchange the elder son made constant Nazi references at the two young German people staying with them which the rest of the family found amusing, and at 15 the youngest daughter put up pictures of herself on Facebook snorting coke.

Dee had what used to be called ‘emotional incontinence'. She felt she must share the most intimate aspects of her life with anyone who’d listen. Her partner who was over a decade older than her and demonstrably didn’t love her; her multiple, dramatic affairs; her children both of whom were taken from family home at the age of 8 to spend the rest of their childhood in special schools; the fact that her younger child has a close resemblance to one of her lovers; her eating disorders and self-harm. She had one job working as a nursery assistant and the rest of her life was spent supported by the State. Dee was killed in a high-speed, late-night, alcohol-fueled crash.

Context is everything. Dee is, of course, Princess Diana who is still treated with the veneration afforded to a saint. The family with dope smoking children live in a detatched home in huge grounds which means that neighbours don’t need to call the police to their rowdy parties and the underage sex and drug abuse is ignored. All of these people and families are worthy of our care and concern, but the woman who, with great dignity, squatted down in the hedge, the man in the council flat, the ‘feral children’ are much more likely to be dealt opprobrium, low-quality interventions and incarceration.
Why is that?