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

Thank you, 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 I was in a house with my best friend at the time. and I said something like that and I said, he's not that crazy? I just had a thought, something that had previously been known in my mind, but I thought about it in words and he said what and we went around in circles. for a while trying trying trying to find this idea of ​​having ideas in your mind that you don't necessarily verbalize you don't necessarily have them in words and in fact we couldn't get anywhere until I did this so this. little requires a little bit of audience participation, you have to catch a ball safely, okay, catch it the first time, uh, a sick catch B ID, at any point during that did you think that the words that ball is going to fall because to gravity, actually?

Neither did my friend and I suspect neither did anyone else here and neither did I at that time. My point is that there are these things going on in our minds all the time, all the time, these things that are just facts of how the world works around us, they are things that we made up as children and then we turned them into rules and then those Rules simply became axioms of existence for us, unquestionable and unquestionable. Now, in fact, for some of us, some things can be more harmful than that. getting into those types of ideas for some of us something as harmful as you being a useless person can get into that type of axiom of existence where it is unquestionable and unquestionable in 2011 I tried to commit suicide, I had spent many years wanting to do it and No, I had come close a couple of times and had not done so out of fear, shame, guilt, cowardice or whatever you want to call it, I was so completely convinced of my total worthlessness that Redemption was impossible. 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 family still seem to care about me and I remember thinking if I just had a switch on the side of my head or some button that I could press or some kind of E.T finger touch where I could show them exactly what it was like to be in my mind, they would understand and understand how horrible both me and my existence were in this world and not only would they understand, they would probably agree, They'd say actually yes, that sounds like it's the best thing for you and that thunderous, overwhelming river of negativity and self-hatred that runs through your mind all the time is exhausting to try to hide.

Those friends and those family members when you secretly pretend you're fine but wish you didn't exist, it's incredibly exhausting, it shrinks your window of existence. I can't think more than a couple of minutes ahead. I live a minute. to the minute Tangled in these webs of what-if scenarios in my head wondering why no one else seemed to care about these things. I remember reading an article on the BBC about a student's suicide and wondering how it made the news because this happens to everyone. All of this spiraled in my head over the years and formed these learned behaviors and neural pathways that compound over time and make it increasingly difficult to break these Traditions.

I could barely contemplate getting better and I certainly didn't deserve it. So far I'm aware that there's something of a spoiler in that story, even that I'm here, obviously alive, telling you how close I came to not being right, so obviously something finally changed and that turning point for me was actually around a month. after I tried to kill myself and that next month was probably the worst of my entire existence, I couldn't even do that in my mind. I simply failed at the one thing I was convinced was going to end the string of consecutive failures.

That's been my whole life up until that point. I struggle with these things. Now we still have these ideas. We need to keep these things internalized. We don't have space to talk about them ourselves. And I remember after I had this. At this point this crisis was in my family's house, I cried for about two days straight, I hit a mirror in my room, it broke everywhere, I bled all over the floor and finally my mom took me for a walk. turned around and, in fact, took all of that. things so that we realize that the world that my mother saw for me and the world that I saw for me were two completely 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 The time I tried to articulate some of this, some of what I told you, what I remember most is this intense pressure, this real paralyzing pressure, that you have exactly one chance to articulate this to your mother. a car that you haven't wanted to exist for the last five years and the only one you can explain because only you are going through it.

I'm here to say that it's actually that last bit, it's that pressure that is problematic, incredibly damaging. and also completely moody, let me take you back to that dance for a second. I can remember exactly where I was the first time I thought the words. I can't see my life going any other way than one where I let everyone I know down. What I ever loved or cared about was about six months after that initial crisis. I had a lot of talk therapy. I had a lot of conversations with friends and it was actually a great moment for me because it was actually a couple of seconds.

After that, it was the first time in my adult life that maybe that wouldn't be the case, maybe I wouldn't live a life where I'd disappoint everyone I'd ever loved and cared about and I never would have. I 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 into words, if I hadn't been able to talk about this with friends and counselors and doctors, because talking about Mental health is the most important thing I have done in my recovery from all of this.

It turns out that talking about mental health is that switch I was looking for in the side of my head. It's not as easy as a switch. It definitely isn't. It's very easy, it's taking me like six or seven years to get to this stage, but you can learn it and ultimately it's the only way to compare Minds to the people I took a year after I had that crisis. I took a year off and lay on a couch and tried not to kill myself for a year and finally went back to studying geography and asked my supervisor if there was any chance I could do my thesis on depression because it's basically the only thing I can do. matters and Rivers Are Really Boring and he says he said, Yeah, that's cool, but you're going to have to learn for yourself all those stats that you didn't show up.

I said: Okay, give me a minute, so I did it and it worked. I realized I was pretty decent, as it turned out I was actually pretty good at statistics, good enough to be offered a PhD, doing exactly that: looking at how we measure and define mental health across the UK. using statistics and finding out who. are most at risk and it is 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 looks at self-assessment of mental health across the UK, which goes out and asks 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? you feel bad? and then we combine them all into one score and that's fundamentally not just measuring people's mental capacity. health is also measuring your ability to talk about your mental health now, as you can see, I'm very aware of the conversations I've had about my mental health, but this is like looking at a distilled version of the mental health of 250,000 people. and the conversations they've had about theirs and in fact in this research the overwhelming consensus is that the people who are having the worst time in the UK right now are young single white women and that's a really important finding and It's a really important find for two.

The first reason is that these people are obviously suffering and we should invest in them, we should prioritize them in our policy, the 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, like suicides. I suspect that at least some of you here are not used to the fact that if you are a man in the UK and under 45, your highest risk of death is suicide.

The same goes for ethnic minorities and immigrants. These are people who suffer a disproportionate burden of suicide, but when we ask them how they feel, they say okay and I. I'm not trying to speculate on who has the worst mental health here. In fact, I suspect that no one can answer that question objectively because we don't even agree on a definition. I'm just here to highlight that difference between those people on the real level. At the end of all of this, those who cannot articulate how they feel, and in fact this has real implications in the real world, it all becomes even more interesting when you take the concept of well-being, which is relatively recent in the quantitative literature on mental health, so in that we tend to remember only these positive and negative statements if we take away the negative ones and just ask people if they feel good about it, then there is 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 are fine when we are not, it is not expressed uniformly in all these things.

It is expressed when we are asked if we feel bad, we will say that we do not feel good but we will not say that we feel bad and, In reality, that means we can't have confidence when we prioritize who we should help with mental health funding, with mental health research, with mental health policy, and that has become overwhelmingly clear to me as an individual and as a researcher, be stoic and say you're fine when you're not present that everyone but you is simply better. I think we actually have a social problem when it comes to talking about negative feelings and that comes in the form of stoicism, it comes in the form of saying that we are fine when we know we are not, we all hear these types of ideas growing up, that It sucks, but it could be worse, you don't feel bad because someone If not, it's worse, at least you didn't grow up in a war-torn country, at least you're not a hungry kid, and obviously the outlook is good, but those ideas They are quite counterproductive because they can invalidate how people feel they can do. they feel that somehow it's not legitimate and I remember as a child, these things really hit me because my family, my mother, she's from Zimbabwe, they came here in the '60s fleeing what were essentially apartheid conditions and so So much so, globally, the opportunities and privileges I have are not lost on me and were not lost on me as a child, and yet the fact that I dared to feel terrible given these undeniable global opportunities I had made me hate myself. myself made me feel guilty made me feel selfish what is the right thing to do?

I have had and still struggle with this at times, but it turns out that actually the logic behind these things is fundamentally flawed because saying you don't feel bad because someone else has it worse is the same logic as saying you can't feel good. because someone has it better and no one says that emotions are not absolute, they are not binary. That kind of line of thinking implies that there are only two people in the world who can feel good or bad and I've done a whole thesis on this now and I guarantee you that you don't know who they are.

We know that emotions don't work like that and these things are still internalized within us. We also listen to these ideas. I'm sure you've heard these Notions of a stiff upper lip, well, keep calm and carry on or keep your chin up or sometimes people throw gender and they're like man up or Big People 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 idea of ​​not talking about suffering is actually a reasonable coping mechanism until you get past this tipping point. and you are in crisis and then it is the worst.

What could you have done because you have no way of communicating to anyone outside of that that you're in that area it's crazy it's like we are if we realized there was an increase in cancer rates no one would be advocating for talking less about screening tests is our The early warning mechanism for these cases forces us to be stoic and say that we are fine when we are not, it forces us to face this false binary of facing it totally fine and feeling the worst we have ever felt and what is worse , and the reason whythe one that I suspect is perpetuated for so long is that it is self-selective because we all feel negative, whether we talk about it or not, for those people who advocate talking less because of the stiff upper lip, they have undoubtedly been through some things , but they have no idea how far this has progressed.

They knew how close they were to that crisis because they never talked about it. It's a bit like people having no idea how well this could work for anyone else and advocating that it should work for everyone despite not knowing how close they were to it not working. to them I think of it a little like that if I took them all here and blindfolded them all and took them in some kind of secret Evil Genius helicopter or something and lined them all up thirty feet in front of the edge of a cliff, they don't know that there is 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 going to have to walk no matter how long it takes you to do it. but you have to walk it, invariably some of you will fall off that cliff, but then the most disconcerting thing happens, which is how everyone left on the cliff starts turning around and chatting to each other about how blindfolds are the best that exists and that we should invest. blindfolded and we should have more blindfolds for everyone.

I'm one of the people who fell off that cliff and I've spent quite a bit of time climbing back up and now I'm back on top, now I'm back on the fool I'm just here screaming screaming begging all of you to take off your blindfold. eyes because Cliff is there for all of us. I don't doubt that some of you in this room have been close to that. I felt close to that. Don't doubt that some of you in this room have been close to it and didn't realize it was there, but it's not worth finding out it's there by falling over and we like to entertain these notions that we may not need to talk about . because we could detect it if it was in someone close to us we could realize it was happening to them but no one saw me and that is not due to negligence on any part I have an incredibly loving relationship family I have very loving friends it is because I couldn't identify myself No I knew it was unusual because no one else talks about their mental health, so if you're not going to talk about your mental health for yourself because it feels good, talk about it with someone else, someone who maybe can't talk about it because it might happen. realize that it's not for them because ultimately, talking about your mental health, talking about your mental health is not just good for you, it's good. thank you all