TRANSCRIPT
I was recently hitchhiking in southern Africa, mostly in Namibia and Zambia. I was riding with a truck driver in a big truck in his cab, and he had picked up a young woman. He was helping her move about five hours to a different village, and they were having a conversation in the Lozi language, which I don’t speak or understand. But it was a chance for me to just relax, listen to the beauty of their language, and look out the window as we drove along.
Then the driver, who I had actually been with at that point for a week, said to me, he says, “Daniel, we’re having a very interesting conversation, and you, as a former psychotherapist, I think you might be able to have some answers for us.” What had happened is this young woman had asked him—totally, she was totally had no idea I’d been a therapist—she had asked him, “Why is it that of the people who are mad, Madness being mental illness, crazy, insane, why is it that of all the people I see in the town that I live in and the cities that I’ve lived in and in the village that I came from in Zambia, why is it that of all these people who have serious mental problems, almost all of them are men?”
They had been discussing this, and the driver didn’t have an answer for it. I asked him, “Have you observed this also?” and he goes, “Yes, most of the mad people in Zambia and of all the countries I’ve been,” because he’s traveled all over southern Africa, he says, “It’s a phenomenon. There are almost all men.” Then I started thinking about it. I’ve traveled a lot in southern Africa myself now, and I have observed the same phenomenon, but it never clicked in my head that I’m like, “Well, are there women who have Madness? Where are they?”
So I said, “Maybe, well, maybe what it is is there are just as many women who have Madness, but they’re inside more. Maybe they’re kept inside.” Both of them said, “No, no, no, no, no, they’re not kept inside. It’s just that there are more men.” And they didn’t have an answer for why.
So over my next week or two in Africa, before I came back here to New York—because this is just a few weeks ago that this question came up—I asked everybody who I thought might have a good answer why this might be. I speculated on it too. Well, first, I’d like to share what I speculated just from what I’ve observed, knowing about people and what I observed as an outsider to their culture and their cultures, because there are many different cultures in the places I visited in southern Africa.
I thought one first thought that came into my mind was there are different social pressures on men, and somehow it causes men to pop or have breakdowns more. A) Drugs and alcohol that men, especially probably drugs, but alcohol too, men use them a lot more from what I observed, and maybe this causes men to have breakdowns more. I reflected this back to the truck driver, my buddy. He shared it, translated it into Lozi and to, I think, Bemba also. They were speaking Bemba as well with this woman in the truck, and they both said, “Maybe it could be that. That’s definitely a possibility,” but they really weren’t sure.
So I talked about it with other people. I actually had a chance to talk about it with a woman who is a psychologist, a Zambian woman, and I believe her primary language was Bemba or maybe Nyanja. She shared, you know, her thoughts. She said, “Definitely it’s true. Definitely, and not just in Zambia and Namibia, but also where I was in Zimbabwe, Botswana, a lot of these other countries, Tanzania. She said it’s true, many, many more men.” But her reason was interesting. She said, “I like your ideas, but I think it’s also because men cannot talk about their feelings. In our part of the world, it’s just so not allowed. Men have to hold it inside. Women are allowed to talk about their feelings in a way that men just can’t do.”
In a way, I have observed this—the intimacy, the physical intimacy, the verbal intimacy. You see women talking about a lot, lot more openly. When I talk to people, a lot of times women, even though there is a gender difference between me and them, and when they heard I was a therapist, so many women would go so deep, so emotionally, so quickly when they spoke with me and in front of their friends, with each other, and in my language, in English, talking about histories of sexual abuse, of childhood trauma, talking about their longings, the difficulty being women in their culture, the stresses that they went through—prejudice, gender prejudices, race prejudices, economic stress, family problems, pressures, pressures romantically with sex, with violence. Women would just go there very quickly.
Some men did very deeply, very quickly go into conversation with me, but less common. I felt women did it much more easily. I started to ask women, “Is this true? You can talk about the way you’re talking with me?” Because it was kind of amazing how quickly people would go deep with me, women, but less men. I think, “Is this normal for you in your life?” Some of them said, “Well, some of these things, no, to talk about this much, but yes, I can talk about this a lot with my women friends, with my sisters, with my mother, much more easily. But definitely much more difficult to talk about this with my brothers, with my father, with my boyfriends.”
Then when I talked about it with guys, the guys who would be very deep and open with me often said, “Well, sometimes I could talk about this with my girlfriend or my wife, but my men friends, not as easily.” Some of them said they could, but definitely I saw this difference of women being able to be more open in their culture and allowance for openness, vulnerability, authenticity about this really deep emotional stuff.
In my culture too, certainly in Europe, also Asia, women often can go there more easily—not always, but often. And then I think of the consequence of what happens when men hold it in. Myself, having been one of those males as a boy, as a kid, and certainly into my 20s, of having to hold everything in, put on a good front, be tough, be strong, never cry, never let out those feelings, never let out my vulnerability. Or if I was angry about things that were going on in my life—and I had a lot to be angry about in my family, in my greater culture, in my school system—I wasn’t allowed to feel angry. I wasn’t allowed to be mad about the bad things that were happening to me and the bad things I was seeing. But I was sometimes allowed to have rage. I was allowed to explode. Violence was allowed, but not the feeling of anger. And so feelings were blocked.
I’m lucky I didn’t go crazy. I’ve realized that more and more and more. In a way, I kind of did go crazy somewhat when I was a teenager. Some of my behavior was crazy. Some of my thoughts were crazy. Certainly had a lot of compulsions and obsessions and self-hatred, depression, some sad and ugly behavior of what I did. Certainly, a lot of my internal talk was crazy. My dreams were crazy. My relationships a lot of time were very unhealthy. All those pushed down feelings all had to go somewhere. Luckily, I never ended up with psychiatry getting its hands on me. I never got medicated for the upwelling feelings that so many people, men and women, have. I never got locked in a mental hospital, but it so easily could have happened, especially if when I was younger I’d been more honest with mental health professionals about what was really going on in my head and in my life. They probably would have forcibly medicated me and locked me up. I luckily escaped. I got away from my family. Luckily, I found a way to fit into society better academically and eventually vocationally in terms of careers such that when I started healing more and finding ways to express my feelings, my life caught up, and I didn’t go nuts. But I think about what I saw well in Africa, what I see all over the world.
Because I see people with madness everywhere. But I think what I saw in Africa, and it’s so sad. Men, young men often, but not sometimes older, sitting on the edge of towns and villages, just sitting, so withdrawn inside of themselves. I would look at their faces. Often, I would try to interact with them, offer them some food if I had some chocolate or a banana or whatever. Sometimes they would take it, sometimes not. Sometimes they were just totally, like, to use that modern psychiatric word, catatonic.
I saw a lot of men in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia just sitting on the edge of towns and villages, filthy, often catatonic, like nothing, blank, just totally within themselves, frozen, locked down, but looking so sad and angry. I would say probably for every one woman I saw who was in that state, I probably saw 20 or 30 guys. Other places, the gender balance is a little bit more equal.
But then I talked to other people beyond this psychologist in Zambia, and I heard different things. I talked to some men about it, some men that I really respect who are older, and they said, well, men have different expectations. Women often can work at home, can fit into society by just working at home, washing, and cleaning. Men are expected to go out to produce money in a different way, to have some sort of career that requires more of a skill set in terms of the world and social skills beyond the family. They have to have friendships and work skills that require greater interaction beyond the family. And for many men, if they just can’t do it, then they just can’t function, and so they retreat. Whereas maybe it’s easier for women. This is a perspective for men. Is this true? I don’t know, but I heard this from quite a few men.
And then there is the thing about the drugs and alcohol. Perhaps worse is the drugs. Some of those drugs I saw people using, really not—I mean, not that I would recommend anyone who’s going through deep emotional problems to try drugs and alcohol, but certainly I could understand why people would want to do it, just to ease the pain, to help those horrible upwelling feelings of rage and sadness and hurt and self-hatred to have that go down with alcohol. Yes, but then I saw people sniffing blue, sniffing petrol, like gasoline, sniffing it out of a bottle. And it’s like, this is like a straight track to brain damage.
So I wonder how many of these people who I saw sitting at the edge of the village, in the town, in the hot sun, sometimes baking and cooking and dirty and filthy, and sometimes looked like they were on the border of starving—were they brain damaged? Are they neurologically damaged from the coping mechanisms they were trying to deal with their feelings? Also, the social rejection that came from being different, from trying drugs that made them perhaps behave differently. I mean, so many things that went into it.
But just thinking about that gender imbalance, because it was something—it was interesting. It just never crossed my mind. Now maybe this is a video that opens more questions than it provides answers, but it was just interesting to me because I’d never been in a place where I saw a gender imbalance quite like that.
But then I think about other places I’ve traveled where it’s like I heard stories of women who were well married at young ages to older men. They had no choice in this marriage. And that I heard—I don’t even want to talk about the different countries, but like, oh yes, you know, we don’t swim in this river, but sometimes people do go in the river, but they die. I’m like, I mean, they’ve fallen? No, no, it’s just women who commit suicide. And I heard this in many villages in certain places where I’ve traveled, where it’s just like that river is the suicide river, where the women who are hopeless and trapped in their lives commit suicide to escape from the horror.
So there’s a gender imbalance in that way there. But again, I just wanted to share about that. And maybe people who watch this video have other ideas about different pressures on men and women, boys and girls, different social pressures, relational pressures, family pressures, romantic and sexual partnership pressures, religious pressures even, that are different, that can express themselves as I saw in Southern Africa in such profoundly different ways between males and females.