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Masculinity

Psychology

26 October 2023

7 min read

The crying man and the content of sadness

In the latest in our series on men and masculinity, psychologist Roger Bretherton reflects on what he learned about being a man from his own mid-life crisis.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A person stand looking out a wide set of windows covered in rain.

Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash.

My midlife crisis began with crying. Alone. In the car. In the study surrounded by books. Curled up on the bathroom floor. Waves of sadness crashed over me, and I couldn’t hold them back. So sudden and inexplicable was this lapse into grief that I felt the need to keep it to myself. It was shameful. It took a month before I finally told anyone and even then, my hand was forced by bursting into tears in front of them. They wondered if it was hormonal. Maybe I was eating badly or sitting still too much. But I knew the sadness had content.

I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be.

It is difficult to make sense of such sadness though. It doesn’t come labelled with its own meaning. It fails to announce itself. It doesn’t ride into our consciousness on a unicycle waving a sign that reads: you are now sad about getting old and feeling like you have failed as a man. It takes a bit of detective work to find out what it all means. But in the end, I had to acknowledge that I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be. In the three areas of life that mattered most to me, family, work, and church, I was a failure. I knew that’s what I thought because my tear ducts started twitching whenever I said it aloud. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone to agree with me. It’s not a fact. It is a massive unrealistic incapacitating overgeneralisation. But apparently the poor twisted neurones of my emotional brain had failed to get that memo.

Every feeling of failure implies a vaguely defined sense of the success that could have been ours but has been lost. If I had failed as a man, what kind of man was I supposed to be? I came to realise that I had unintentionally imbibed a seductive model of masculinity that was ultimately unachievable. For want of a better term I came to call it the man-at-the-centre. The man-at-the-centre game is really easy to play. It is a simple rule of thumb for what any man should be. It works in any context you can think of, and goes like this…

What should a man be at work? He should be at the centre of a team of adoring colleagues.

What should a man be at home? He should be at the centre of an adoring wife and family.

What should a man be at church? He should be at the centre of an adoring congregation.

The man-at-the-centre game requires that every situation a man enters should immediately configure itself into a picture postcard in which he holds pride of place.

Obviously, this view defines masculinity entirely in terms of power. And not even the kind of power that makes any sense. Not the power to be wise, or brave, or generous, or fair, or honest, or loyal. But the power to force other people be exactly as we would like them to be. The insistence that social life is only acceptable if made to conform to our exact specifications. The man-at-the-centre equates masculinity with being in charge, and even the tiniest lapse in control as a failure to be a man, a surrendering of one’s right to exist as a male. Kierkegaard summed up despair in precisely these binary terms, the desire to be Caesar or nothing.

A one-way ticket to Blametown

I can’t be sure if this insight is true of ALL men, some men, or just me. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity at all. Perhaps I’m just describing my own narcissism. But either way, it’s embarrassing to admit that I even thought this. I don’t even know where this belief came from. It goes against everything I have stood for in support of women, and in collaboration with men. It is quite frankly a ridiculous thing to believe - and yet there I was, just as surprised as anyone else to find myself believing it. It turns out the old church billboard was right:

You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.

And I don’t really want to chalk it up to The Patriarchy. Whenever anyone starts on about The Patriarchy, I have the ominous feeling I’m about to be blamed for something. It reminds me how I used to feel when I worked in mental health services in the NHS.

Two- or three-times a year it seems the national media are obligated to run a story about the inadequacy of care for people with mental illness. Usually based on a report about people being let down. The catastrophic failure of care for young women with eating disorders, or young men with depression, or women on the autistic spectrum. The stories are heartbreaking, and everyone agrees that something must be done. As a lowly frontline worker, nobody blamed me, but I knew that in the weeks that followed I’d be subjected to something that felt very much like blame. No one said it was my fault, but the demands, the hours, the targets, the scrutiny, the bureaucracy would proliferate. None of it would solve the problem, but those who were trying to help would not go unpunished.

So, as a one-way ticket to Blametown, I’m not keen on too much talk about The Patriarchy. But when I consider my hardwired tendency to think of masculinity as the man-at-the-centre, and the despair that accompanies the failure to definitively accomplish this, am I not describing something a little bit like patriarchy? A social system that offers men such a restricted view of what it means to be male, that almost no one can be happy confining themselves to it. An invitation to inhabit a narrow bandwidth of conversations, interests, clothing, emotions and sitting positions so as not to score an own goal for the men’s team by betraying weakness. It’s not like any of this is working for anyone but, beyond exorcism, what can we possibly do about it?

The real Man-at-the-centre

It's not a huge surprise that this midlife crisis struck when it did. Every crisis has a context. Every breakthrough starts with a breakdown. Sometimes I feel like I invited it, because for the last five years I have been practicing contemplative prayer. Twice a day – on a good day – I hole up somewhere alone. Sometimes the study or the bedroom, my office at work, a bench in the park or a seat by the window. I pray in the same places I cry. The twenty-minute timer on my smart phone begins and ends with the sound of a monastery bell. And when it is set, I close my eyes and follow the simple rule of contemplative practice: lifting my heart to God with a humble stirring of love. And for twenty minutes that is all I do. In response to every distraction or entertaining thought, I turn from the noise of my mind back to being lovingly present to the mysterious Presence in the present moment.

Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity.

One of the central tenets of contemplative prayer is that when we make space for God like this, we not only meet Him, but we also meet ourselves. I don’t think my insight into needing to be the man-at-the-centre would have been available to me, if I hadn’t been practicing its polar opposite several times a day. In the discipline of contemplative prayer, we decentre the ego, we step over our self-absorption, we fill our consciousness with something that is not us. My experience of it is that when I turn to God with love, I find myself held in a vast field of loving attentiveness, infinitely greater than my own. And over time, this creeps into every corner of life, infecting every moment of contact with family, friends, colleagues, and students with the supreme joy of simply being there for that unique unrepeatable moment of their existence. Whether I am the man-at-the-centre of home, work or church becomes an irrelevance. What matters is not what these situations give to me, but what I can give to them.

This speaks to the supreme paradox at the heart of Christianity. One that is in constant danger of slipping through our fingers. If we grasp it too hard it crumbles in our hands. It stems from the fact that there is a man-at-the-centre of the Christian religion. Arguably the most famous man of all time. Depicted in icons, brushed into frescoes, melted in stained glass, moulded in sculpture, and portrayed on camera. His face appears everywhere, and if we are not careful, we may mistakenly assume that we are celebrating his fame – the greatest influencer ever born. But what makes Jesus the man-at-the-centre is not the ingenuity with which his publicity machine crowned him king of the hill, but the absolute giving of self that characterised his life. The real Man-at-the-centre is the radically de-centred Man.

Personally, I find there to be a seamless continuity between the Jesus I meet in scripture, and the Spirit that animates the life of prayer. Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity. Not a humiliation of masculine power, but a profound transforming and redirecting of it. It is the only thing I have yet found that can truly photosynthesise the carbon-dioxide of fear, rage and self-hatred that suffocates so many men, into the liberating oxygen of joyful loving strength that is their birthright.

Review

Books

Care

Comment

Psychology

23 July 2025

7 min read

We don’t have an over-diagnosis problem, we have a society problem

Suzanne O’Sullivan's question is timely

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A visualised glass head shows a swirl of pink across the face.

Maxim Berg on Unsplash.

Rates of diagnoses for autism and ADHD are at an all-time high, whilst NHS funding remains in a perpetual state of squeeze. In this context, consultant neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan, in her recent book The Age of Diagnosis, asks a timely question: can getting a diagnosis sometimes do more harm than good? Her concern is that many of these apparent “diagnoses” are not so much wrong as superfluous; in her view, they risk harming a person’s sense of wellbeing by encouraging self-imposed limitations or prompting them to pursue treatments that may not be justified.

There are elements of O-Sullivan’s argument that I am not qualified to assess. For example, I cannot look at the research into preventative treatments for localised and non-metastatic cancers and tell you what proportion of those treatments is unnecessary. However, even from my lay-person’s perspective, it does seem that if the removal of a tumour brings peace of mind to a patient, however benign that tumour might be, then O’Sullivan may be oversimplifying the situation when she proposes that such surgery is an unnecessary medical intervention.

But O’Sullivan devotes a large proportion of the book to the topics of autism and ADHD – and on this I am less of a lay person. She is one of many people who are proposing that these are being over diagnosed due to parental pressure and social contagion. Her particular concern is that a diagnosis might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, limiting one’s opportunities in life: “Some will take the diagnosis to mean that they can’t do certain things, so they won’t even try.” Notably, O’Sullivan persists with this argument even though the one autistic person whom she interviewed for the book actually told her the opposite: getting a diagnosis had helped her interviewee, Poppy, to re-frame a number of the difficulties that she was facing in life and realise they were not her fault.

Poppy’s narrative is one with which we are very familiar at the Centre for Autism and Theology, where our team of neurodiverse researchers have conducted many, many interviews with people of all neurotypes across multiple research projects. Time and time again we hear the same thing: getting a diagnosis is what helps many neurodivergent people make sense of their lives and to ask for the help that they need. As theologian Grant Macaskill said in a recent podcast:

“A label, potentially, is something that can help you to thrive rather than simply label the fact that you're not thriving in some way.”

Perhaps it is helpful to remember how these diagnoses come about, because neurodivergence cannot be identified by any objective means such as by a blood test or CT scan. At present the only way to get a diagnosis is to have one’s lifestyle, behaviours and preferences analysed by clinicians during an intrusive and often patronising process of self-disclosure.

Despite the invidious nature of this diagnostic process, more and more people are willing to subject themselves to it. Philosopher Robert Chapman looks to late-stage capitalism for the explanation. Having a diagnosis means that one can take on what is known as the “sick role” in our societal structures. When one is in the “sick role” in any kind of culture, society, or organisation, one is given social permission to take less personal responsibility for one’s own well-being. For example, if I have the flu at home, then caring family members might bring me hot drinks, chicken soup or whatever else I might need, so that I don’t have to get out of bed. This makes sense when I am sick, but if I expected my family to do things like that for me all the time, then I would be called lazy and demanding! When a person is in the “sick role” to whatever degree (it doesn’t always entail being consigned to one’s bed) then the expectations on that person change accordingly.

Chapman points out that the dynamics of late-stage capitalism have pushed more and more people into the “sick role” because our lifestyles are bad for our health in ways that are mostly out of our own control. In his 2023 book, Empire of Normality, he observes,

“In the scientific literature more generally, for instance, modern artificial lighting has been associated with depression and other health conditions; excessive exposure to screen time has been associated with chronic overstimulation, mental health conditions, and cognitive disablement; and noise annoyance has been associated with a twofold increase in depression and anxiety, especially relating to noise pollution from aircraft, traffic, and industrial work.”

Most of this we cannot escape, and on top of it all we live life at a frenetic pace where workers are expected to function like machines, often subordinating the needs and demands of the body. Thus, more and more people begin to experience disablement, where they simply cannot keep working, and they start to reach for medical diagnoses to explain why they cannot keep pace in an environment that is constantly thwarting their efforts to stay fit and well. From this arises the phenomenon of “shadow diagnoses” – this is where “milder” versions of existing conditions, including autism and ADHD, start to be diagnosed more commonly, because more and more people are feeling that they are unsuited to the cognitive, sensory and emotional demands of daily working life.

When I read in O’Sullivan’s book that a lot more people are asking for diagnoses, what I hear is that a lot more people are asking for help.

O’Sullivan rightly observes that some real problems arise from this phenomenon of “shadow diagnoses”. It does create a scenario, for example, where autistic people who experience significant disability (e.g., those who have no perception of danger and therefore require 24-hour supervision to keep them safe) are in the same “queue” for support as those from whom being autistic doesn’t preclude living independently.

But this is not a diagnosis problem so much as a society problem – health and social care resources are never limitless, and a process of prioritisation must always take place. If I cut my hand on a piece of broken glass and need to go to A&E for stiches, I might find myself in the same “queue” as a 7-year-old child who has done exactly the same thing. Like anyone, I would expect the staff to treat the child first, knowing that the same injury is likely to be causing a younger person much more distress. Autistic individuals are just as capable of recognising that others within the autism community may have needs that should take priority over their own.

What O’Sullivan overlooks is that there are some equally big positives to “shadow diagnoses” – especially as our society runs on such strongly capitalist lines. When a large proportion of the population starts to experience the same disablement, it becomes economically worthwhile for employers or other authorities to address the problem. To put it another way: If we get a rise in “shadow diagnoses” then we also get a rise in “shadow treatments” – accommodations made in the workplace/society that mean everybody can thrive. As Macaskill puts it:

“Accommodations then are not about accommodating something intrinsically negative; they're about accommodating something intrinsically different so that it doesn't have to be negative.”

This can be seen already in many primary schools: where once it was the exception (and highly stigmatised) for a child to wear noise cancelling headphones, they are now routinely made available to all students, regardless of neurotype. This means not only that stigma is reduced for the one or two students who may be highly dependent on headphones, but it also means that many more children can benefit from a break from the deleterious effects of constant noise.

When I read in O’Sullivan’s book that a lot more people are asking for diagnoses, what I hear is that a lot more people are asking for help. I suspect the rise in people identifying as neurodivergent reflects a latent cry of “Stop the world, I want to get off!” This is not to say that those coming forward are not autistic or do not have ADHD (or other neurodivergence) but simply that if our societies were gentler and more cohesive, fewer people with these conditions would need to reach for the “sick role” in order to get by.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, if we want the number of people asking for the “sick role” to decrease, we actually need to be diagnosing more people! In this way, we push our capitalist society towards adopting “shadow-treatments” – adopting certain accommodations in our schools and workplaces as part of the norm. When this happens, there are benefits not only for neurodivergent people, but for everybody.

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