I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

This is not a self-help book. It doesn’t really give you any strategies for getting over depression, it just points out that there’s a problem.

It identifies “covert depression,” which is often masked in men – it comes out as anger, infidelity, or addiction. Men don’t want to admit that they’re depressed, so they exhibit all sorts of other toxic behaviors. The author claims that this has to become overt depression, because we can’t treat it until we admit to it.

He goes into depth about some of his patients (all composites, he says in the foreword). These narratives are…thrilling. They’re written in a very fiction-like style, and he brings us into actual conversations that happened. Some of them are hard to read.

His theory is that the male is wounded by his past. There’s a lot of “inner child” stuff. We get hurt by our parents or people in our past, and his reverberates through our entire lives.

I don’t know that this would appeal to everyone. It’s very much a “kinder, gentler” type of therapy. At several points, the author talks about his own journey, which was a bit of a mess – his father was quite a piece of work.

So, mixed bag here. I would have enjoyed reading it more, I think, if the chapters were shorter. They were just immense, and I was trying to read a chapter at a time, which meant every time I picked it up, it was something of a commitment.

I found the author from his NY Times article: How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me

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