What makes celebrity meltdowns entertainment instead of tragedy? | David Ferguson

When I was in my 20s, I remember my therapist patiently listening to me complain about how out-of-my-depth I often felt around other gay men. I was asking her why they always seemed so effortlessly aloof and cool, whereas I was – and to some extent, still am – a slobbering golden retriever of a person, quivering with eagerness to be your new best friend.

“You’ll waste a lot of time and spoil a lot of happiness comparing your insides to other people’s outsides,” she told me.

I think about this a lot when I see famous people – rock stars, celebrities, politicians – going into meltdown mode. Trainwreck TV is one of our culture’s most avid pleasures. In the words of Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous, “It’s the only blood sport they haven’t banned, darling.”

Right now, everyone is waiting to see what the next eruption from Kanye West will be now that he’s out of the hospital after months – some would say years – of erratic behavior, bizarre concert spectacles and public meltdowns. It’s almost expected, since the Grammy nominations were announced this week and West was again shut out of the major categories.

A few years ago the spectacle du jour was Amanda Bynes, and before that, Britney Spears when she shaved her head and ended up under psychiatric care.

We’ve shaken our heads and tutted over the breakdowns of Mariah Carey and Courtney Love, Amy Winehouse and Gary Busey, Katt Williams and Dave Chappelle, Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith – any celebrities who have had the misfortune to exhibit symptoms of mental illness while living in the public eye.

We take a certain sanctimonious pleasure in these people’s public disintegration and show shockingly little compassion, as though their wildly successful careers and personal fortunes make their pain more acceptable than that of mere mortals.

If a random woman we don’t know starts babbling nonsense and getting hysterical while we’re out shopping, it’s tragic. We avert our eyes. We tell our families when we get home how unsettling and upsetting it was. But when Spears does it, it’s a Rolling Stone cover story that we consume with the eagerness of kids tearing into a bag of candy.

It’s the same mentality that allows a racist troll like Milo Yiannopoulos to airily wave away the steaming, reeking mountain of harassment his followers and supporters firehosed at Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones, mostly on Twitter. Leslie Jones is a rich and famous actress; who cares if people say nasty things about her on the internet?

At what point do we stop valuing celebrities’ humanity?

Is it an income-level thing? Kanye West has got a lot of money. He’s one of the most well-known performers on the planet who isn’t Beyoncé or Beyoncé-adjacent. He has broken paradigms and yes, over-extended his brand, as it were, in a couple of areas, but he’s also a creative young person with a young family under tremendous pressure who lost his beloved mother nine years ago.

He has written openly about his love for liquor, cocaine and other intoxicants. It does not take a tremendous amount of imagination to piece together what may have happened here to a stressed-out artist in pain.

Let’s pretend for a moment that it isn’t Kanye West, but Keith West, who you knew in college who works for a life insurance company now. What if his mother died in surgery and he began a multi-year downward spiral?

Would you be gawking if Keith got placed on involuntary hold in a psychiatric unit? Would you be sharing links about Keith on Twitter and Facebook and marveling that someone could become such a mess?

Kanye West may be, as President Obama once said, “a jackass” from time to time. But he’s also still a person.

Millions of dollars in the bank doesn’t mean anything when you want your mom and she’s gone, I suspect, any more than the significantly less princely sum in my own checking account does. You can’t buy five more minutes to be with your dead mom for any amount of money, large or small.

So, maybe the next time you start to click on that Perez Hilton link about whichever celebrity’s mind has most recently hit the big bug-zapper, take a second. Ask yourself how you’d feel if your life’s most humiliating, confused, disoriented moment was out there for public amusement.

If the person suffering at the other end of that hyperlink was Keith and not Kanye, would you still click it?

What makes celebrity meltdowns entertainment instead of tragedy? | David Ferguson

ABC"s Man Up tackles the tragedy of male suicide – but only among blokey blokes

According to figures released last month, Australia’s suicide rate is increasing, and death among men from intentional self-harm is three times greater than that for women.

In Man Up, a three-part ABC-TV series which aired its second episode on Tuesday, radio presenter Gus Worland is spurred by the 2006 suicide of a friend, Angus – and, more recently, conversations with his widow and daughter – to challenge stoic, self-reliant stereotypes of masculinity, and instead champion emotional vulnerability and communication as signs of strength.

It’s a well-meaning, heartfelt show, but flawed: Man Up spends too much time trying to entertain and not enough time challenging the normalised, constructed identities of Australian manhood – white, heterosexual, masculine – which continue to alienate anyone who falls outside them.

Worland jackhammers concrete on a worksite, talking to men in the construction industry about their particularly high risk of suicide. He goes yachting with returned military servicemen dealing with trauma. He takes part in male nude yoga – all in an attempt to get beneath the skin of men.

Gus Worland and farmer John Harper at the Mate Helping Mate country man organisation meeting, featured in Man Up. Photograph: ABC

He poses for a GQ shoot, while we learn about commercial, fluffy categories of manhood: metrosexuality, retrosexuality and, I kid you not, lumber-sexuality (some sort of mix of lumberjack and hipsterism). He tries to craft a media campaign to appeal to men to talk, even consulting one advertising guru who was responsible for reinforcing the stereotype that the social world of men revolves around booze and barmaids with big boobs.

All of this is watchable, but it leaves less than a minute for discussion of the high rate of suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men. That task falls to Wiradjuri man Joe Williams, a former National Rugby League Rabbitohs player who doesn’t appear on screen but whose voice is heard as a radio talkback caller.

There is no explicit mention of gay and bisexual men, or those whose identity falls outside normalised gender binaries. If, as the Man Up manifesto states, the “pressure to be an Aussie man is fuelling a suicide crisis”, then we must acknowledge the groups of men who are the most at risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal feelings.

This show cannot be all things to all people, of course – yet it doesn’t even seem interested in trying to speak to the spectrum beyond blokey blokes. Man Up’s reliance in Tuesday’s episode on UK-born Australian psychologist and author Steve Biddulph – whose opinion is unquestioningly sought in on-the-road interviews – makes me wonder if the series is coming from a very conservative view of male identity.

Steve Biddulph, author of Raising Boys. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Biddulph’s 1997 book Raising Boys is described in Man Up as “the handbook on how we can better raise Australia’s sons” – but I remember it differently.Biddulph’s glib, blithe discussion of homosexuality in an early edition distressed my own mother, making her fear she was at fault for my orientation – even though I’ve been living happily as a gay-identifying man for some time. It was in Biddulph’s book, so it must be true, right?

Now in its fourth edition (2013), Biddulph has made a few palatable tweaks to his bestseller, but it still raises dubious “mounting evidence” that sexuality may be determined by “certain hormonal settings” in the womb – without citing an actual scientific reference. The book still makes the outdated, sloppy suggestion that having a teenage gay son “demolishes” parents’ “fond hopes” of a “rewarding career, marriage and grandchildren”. And it still says that “some dads fear that cuddling their son will turn him into a ‘sissy’. In fact, the reverse is probably true.” (To his credit, Biddulph has deleted the subsequent line of earlier editions: “Many gay or bisexual men I have spoken to say a lack of fatherly affection was part of what made male affection more important to them.”)

As Flinders University psychologist associate professor Damien Riggs wrote in 2008: “[Biddulph’s] inference is that if fathers gave more affection the sons wouldn’t grow up to be gay, which is thus constructed as the preferable option.”

The most affecting scenes in Man Up involve Worland’s own teenage son, Jack. In the second episode, facilitator Tom Harkin runs a special workshop on masculinity, in which Jack and fellow students apply nail polish. “Not a guy thing to do,” says Harkin, who then asks: “Who wrote that rule?”

The workshop encourages these teenagers to rethink what it means to be a man, to talk, to listen and to show emotion. To cry, which they do, openly and cathartically. This would have been the ideal point to say: it’s OK to be straight, bisexual, gay, queer; it’s OK to question your identity or gender. But the show is too timid to make that important leap, instead relying uncritically on Biddulph as a barometer of all men’s emotional lives.

Gus Worland and his son Jack. Photograph: ABC

There are other missed opportunities. Man Up vaguely links suicidal ideation among men to financial pressures. What these pressures are is not spelled out, but surely there is a great deal to say about the growing inequity between rich and poor. The rising costs of rent and mortgages under a government unwilling to change investment policies. The burden many men take on to be primary breadwinners, and where that burden comes from.

We are told in Man Up that women attempt to take their lives more often than men, but men are more likely to die. We are told this is because women reach out for help more often, but other factors – such as the preference among women for drugs as a means of suicide – would have been worth discussing.

My hopes for Man Up clearly overreached its narrowly focused aims. But in its sincere efforts to find a new vocabulary for men, the series is a step in the right direction.

• Man Up continues on 25 October on the ABC; for information and support in Australia call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636

ABC"s Man Up tackles the tragedy of male suicide – but only among blokey blokes

How family tragedy turned Roald Dahl into a medical pioneer

In 1990, I was a junior doctor at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. I had finished all my training, and was now starting my first year on the wards. Roald Dahl was one of my patients. I can still remember the night I first met him.

It was nearly midnight and the lights were low. I was working away on the ward computer when I became aware of this large figure wandering slowly nearer, casting a great big shadow. I carried on tapping, concentrating. The restless patient walked past the nurses’ station, where I was sitting, and a few moments later wandered back again. He must have come past three or four times, each time a little slower, peering over my shoulder, trying to see what I found so absorbing. Eventually he stopped.

“What are you doing?”

It was a deep, booming voice. I looked up to see a giant of a man towering over me. He was wearing a silk nightshirt, and was wrapped in a huge dressing gown. He had large ears and twinkling, inquisitive eyes. It almost felt as if The BFG was peering down at me. But it wasn’t the Big Friendly Giant. It was Roald Dahl himself.

‘Words is oh such a twitch tickling problem’ … The BFG. Photograph: AP

We started chatting. I think Dahl was intrigued. Being a world famous author, he was used to people fussing and fawning over him, yet here was someone who seemed to be paying him no attention at all. Rather than dismiss me, however, Dahl wanted to know all about the medical research I was writing up on the computer.

“And have you read any of my books?” he asked after a while.

“Well,” I said and paused. “I have not read any, but I loved the film of The Jungle Book.”

The Jungle Book, as you probably know, is a wonderful film based on a fabulous book, but it is not by Dahl, it is by Rudyard Kipling. He looked at me curiously, trying to decide whether I was completely ignorant, or just teasing. Suddenly, having decided that this was a great joke, he roared with laughter. We became good friends after that.

After her stroke, Dahl’s wife Patricia invented new words: a drink was a ‘sooty swatch’ and he made her ‘skitch’ (cross)

As a junior doctor, I was on call every third night. Dahl found it difficult to sleep, and in the hushed semi-darkness of the wee small hours, we would chat. What about? Just about everything: people, places, literature, love, music, marriage … and medicine. He told me all about his life, especially his extraordinary – and often tragic – encounters with the medical world.

Most people know Dahl as a famous writer of children’s books, but few are aware of his fascination with medicine. Right from his earliest days to the end of his life, Dahl was intrigued by what doctors do and why. Indeed, he often said he would have liked to have been a doctor. During his lifetime, he and his family suffered some terrible medical tragedies – but he also played a part in some incredible medical triumphs.

In 1965, Dahl’s first wife, the Oscar-winning actor Patricia Neal, had a brain haemorrhage, causing a stroke that nearly killed her. She underwent an operation to stop the bleeding, but the left half of her brain was damaged. She was unable to talk, and her right side was paralysed, though gradually things began to improve.

“I witnessed the slow, mysterious recovery of a brain that had been severely insulted,” Dahl recalled one evening in Oxford, “and the steady return to consciousness of the owner of that brain.” Pat eventually left hospital and her speech began to return, but she struggled with the names of objects and people. When she couldn’t find the words, she invented new ones. A drink was a “soap driver” or a “sooty swatch”. A cigarette was an “oblogon”. Pat would complain that Dahl “made her skitch” (cross) or “gave her the sinkers” (depression).

Patricia, Dahl and Valeria Eaton Griffith, with whom he wrote a stroke guide. Photograph: RDNL/Courtesy RDMSC

Dahl made careful notes of these neologisms, which helped with an article he was writing about her stroke for Ladies’ Home Journal, but he may have thought they would come in useful elsewhere. It would be more than 15 years before The BFG would greet little Sophie with a bellow of laughter and the words: “Just because I is a giant, you think I is a man gobbling cannybull … ! Please understand that I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly … Words is oh such a twitch tickling problem to me all my life …”

Dahl spent hours creating new words for The BFG, many of which, as he said of Pat’s neologisms, were better than the originals. He described human beans that taste scrumdiddlyumptious or uckyslush; a zoo full of hippodumplings and crocadowndillies; the telly telly bunkum box. Dahl’s account of The BFG’s difficulty could have come straight from the mouth of Pat: “You must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling … I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff squiddled around … what I mean and what I says is two different things …”

Like other children’s authors, Dahl had made up words before, but in The BFG there was a veritable explosion. Dahl was vague when I asked him about the link. “Well, I’d always enjoyed making up new words. That’s part of the fun, you know, that keeps the nippers interested. But I suppose, yes, some of the trouble Pat had did work its way into The BFG. Yes, it must have.”

It seemed so obvious to me that I was amazed to find subsequently, while researching my book about Dahl’s medical achievements, that it had never been explored before. Looking back, I wish I had probed Dahl further. Having now read much more about this extraordinary man, I know that the answer he gave about neologisms was the sort of nebulous response he gave when he felt the truth of the matter was not exactly the story he wanted to tell.

Take The Gremlins: he wrote the book for Walt Disney, with a view to turning it into a film, and brought the expression into popular usage, but did he actually invent the term “gremlins”? Then there’s the question of how his plane came down in Libya during the second world war – was he really shot down, or did he crashland after being given the wrong location of an airfield by an incompetent commanding officer? And did the resulting “monumental bash on the head” really convert a promising oil executive into a bestselling author, as Dahl claimed, or was the literary potential already there, just waiting to express itself?

Perhaps Dahl felt some discomfort at having based the speech of one of his best-loved characters on the aftereffects of his wife’s stroke. Or maybe he had never recognised the link until I raised it. No one in the family remembers him discussing it, but then he rarely talked about the books he was working on. Either way, Pat’s stroke provided inspiration for more than just The BFG’s Gobblefunk language. Back in 1965, there was little in the way of rehabilitation for stroke patients: Dahl was told just one hour a day would be appropriate.

“Surely one hour a day is not enough,” he said to me. “What in the world are you going to teach a child if she only goes to school for an hour a day? That is what Pat was like then – a child. She didn’t even know her ABC.”

Stanley Wade with the valve they invented to treat Dahl’s son’s hydrocephalus. Photograph: Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

He feared she would become an “enormous pink cabbage”, so he set up – with friends and neighbours in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire – an intensive six-hours-a-day regime. Some professionals warned this was too much, but he ignored them. Pat was coached back to normality “slowly, insidiously and quite relentlessly”. She eventually resumed her acting career, even getting another Oscar nomination.

This miraculous recovery attracted a lot of attention. Other stroke patients and their families wrote to ask how Dahl had managed it. So with the help of a neighbour, Valerie Eaton Griffith, Dahl wrote a guide. She developed this into a book, and the methods were taken up widely, inspiring a whole new movement, which led to the formation of The Stroke Association.

Theo convalescing with, from left, Olivia, Patricia, Tessa and Dahl. Photograph: RDNL/Courtesy RDMSC

Amazingly, Dahl’s extraordinary medical influence did not stop there. One evening, we were chatting about a report I was sending to the Lancet. “Ah yes,” he commented casually, “it’s a good journal. We published there many years ago … Yes, we invented a valve for hydrocephalus.” From the sparkle in his eyes, I suspected he was trying to get a rise from me. He enjoyed teasing junior doctors. Had he really invented a neurosurgical device to treat water on the brain? I didn’t believe a word. I knew Dahl was a great storyteller. But, 25 years after his death, while researching my book, I was astonished to find that this was true.

Dahl’s son Theo had developed hydrocephalus after being hit by a taxi, aged four months. The valve he was fitted with kept blocking and, in characteristic style, Dahl set about solving the problem with the help of a neurosurgeon – and a toymaker. “We produced this splendid little valve,” Dahl told me. “It was used to treat thousands of children around the world.” My neurosurgical colleagues still occasionally come across them today, while operating on adults who had them inserted as children.

‘We thought she was over the worst of it’ … Olivia, who died after catching measles. Photograph: RDNL/Courtesy RDMSC

And then there was his involvement in measles vaccination, an altogether more devastating episode. When Dahl’s daughter Olivia caught the virus aged seven, she developed the most severe form, with inflammation of the brain: encephalitis. She died within days. Dahl was devastated and, for years, would barely talk about it. But with me, he was very open.

“We thought she was over the worst of it,” he said one evening. “One saw, you know, the usual sort of thing: the fever, the tiredness, the spots. We even teased her for her polka dots.” Dahl had a wan smile and his eyes began to well up. He looked so tired and sad. After the initial illness, Olivia had appeared to improve before slipping into a coma. There was nothing anyone could do. But when the measles vaccine became available some years later, Dahl did all he could to help its uptake. He supported campaigns with a famous measles letter to children which is still used today, and badgered the government to do more.

I realise now, as we chatted all those years ago, Dahl wasn’t so much teasing me, as being coy about all he had achieved. Apparently, he could be proud, boastful, arrogant and argumentative when discussing his writing. But when talking about these major medical breakthroughs, he was happy to minimise his role, giving the credit to others.

I was privileged to look after Dahl as his life came to an end. He wrote so poignantly about fatalities in the war, and devised such bizarre deaths in his Tales of the Unexpected, I wondered how he would face his own demise. I found it was with humour, humility – and an unending fascination in medical science.

• Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine by Tom Solomon is published by Liverpool University Press on 13 September. The Stroke Association is one of six charities benefiting from sales of the book. Tom Solomon tweets @RunningMadProf; tomsolomon.co.uk

How family tragedy turned Roald Dahl into a medical pioneer

Britain"s male suicide charge is a nationwide tragedy | Ally Fogg

‘The influence of male conditioning demands “boys never cry” on discomfort of humiliation.’ Photograph: Terry Smith Photos/Alamy

In 1981, two,466 ladies in the United kingdom took their own lives. 3 decades later, thanks to enhancements in psychiatric and emergency care medication, to a assortment of suicide prevention barriers and policies and, maybe, to gradual social, political and individual empowerment, the amount in 2012 had practically halved to 1,391.

In 1981, 4,129 males in the Uk took their personal lives. Three decades later, despite improvements in psychiatric and emergency care medication, a variety of suicide prevention barriers and policies and, arguably, some degree of social, political and individual empowerment, the amount in 2012 had risen to four,590.

The most current suicide statistics from the ONS demonstrate the biggest gender gulf considering that information began. The suicide fee for men is now three and a half times that of ladies. Breaking down the statistics, the most worrying trend is a rise in the fee amid males aged forty-44. It is striking as well that whereas thirty many years ago the dangers for men had been greatest in London and the south-east and lowest in the north, the picture has now fully reversed. This tallies with research by Samaritans, who have located that guys at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile are at biggest danger. Clare Wyllie, its head of policy and study, was quoted as saying: “They will expand up expecting by the time they attain mid-existence they’ll have a wife who will search right after them and a work for daily life in a male business. In actuality they may possibly locate that they reach middle age in a extremely various place. Society has this masculine ideal that individuals are expecting to dwell up to. Lots of that has to do with getting a breadwinner. When males do not live up to that it can be quite devastating for them.”

Even though I may well quibble with the phrase “a wife who will search after them”, Wyllie is definitely proper to note the iniquitous and stubborn position of masculine gender noms in this difficulty. Much of this is internalised. Men are imbued with a cultural model of the husband and father who is there to defend and provide – an ideal that society continues to advertise as a measure of masculine well worth, although as well usually snatching away the chance, signifies and circumstances by which it can be attained. But the problems go deeper. There is the insidious influence of macho conditioning that beseeches to “man up” and demands that “boys never cry” on pain of mockery and humiliation. These values are straight implicated in men’s reluctance to seek out assist and help, whether or not from buddies or specialists, preferring to self-medicate with alcohol or medicines with all the consequences that holds for careers, relationships, social isolation and homelessness, all of which are recognized to be important danger variables for suicide.

If males are typically their personal worst enemies when it comes to getting assistance in times of require, they are not helped by a wider society which typically looks to deal with the needs of guys with the very same indifference proven by guys ourselves.

That suicide is a gendered phenomenon is a looming, inescapable, self-evident reality. And but it is one that looks to have largely escaped the observe of government. In late 2012, the Division of Health issued the Suicide Prevention Method for England, a 57-webpage document setting out policy priorities which, remarkably, manufactured no reference to gender or to male-certain troubles at all. Rather, nine target groups were specified, such as younger people, LGBT groups, refugees, asylum-seekers and minority ethnic communities. There are certainly distinct and pressing demands inside of all people groups that demand consideration, but the rather massive elephant was left silently brooding in a dark corner of the space.

The Policy Research Programme is at the moment investing £1.5m over 3 many years into six suicide-relevant projects. They cover self-harming behaviour, the circumstance of LGBT youth and the role of the internet and social media in relation to suicidal behaviour. Once more, the dilemma is not what is there, but what is missing.

Some progress at least was created in the very first yearly update to the Suicide Prevention Technique, published a couple of weeks in the past. Below the chairmanship of psychiatrist Professor Louis Appleby, this lastly acknowledged that middle-aged guys are a high-danger group. It was only a web page and the proposals contained are constrained and modest, jabbing a finger at GPs and local community outreach programmes. Nonetheless, in acknowledging the dilemma at all, it marks an critical stage forward.

Our failure to even dent the charge of male suicides more than thirty many years is a national scandal and a national tragedy. It is a failure that has cost tens of thousands of lives, stolen from us also numerous friends, fathers, sons, and brothers. To what extent we may possibly have been ready to reduce the costs with a concerted effort we cannot know because, shamefully, we have never truly attempted. If the next 30 many years are to comply with a diverse pattern, then acknowledging the correct nature of the dilemma is a important 1st step.

The Samaritans’ 24-hour helpline is 08457 909090

Britain"s male suicide charge is a nationwide tragedy | Ally Fogg