Within the past week, I've seen this Facebook video go somewhat viral. It's a video of a mother telling the story of her late husband. She holds up pieces of paper that tell the perfect love story of high school sweethearts, who get married and have kids. She continues the story, revealing that her husband is in the military and has been deployed more than once. She mentioned his most recent deployment and how her husband was not the same person after it. She knew he was depressed and detached, but he wouldn't go to therapy because he would lose his security clearance. This woman's husband, unfortunately, committed suicide instead of seeking treatment.

We've come a long way in the mental health world. There is more open conversation about conditions like depression, and the stigma is slowly beginning to fade. However, there is one disparity I have seen more and more recently: the assumption that guys don't go to or need therapy. We live in a patriarchal society where it isn't very socially acceptable for men to show their emotions; this has been ingrained into our subconscious way of life. Simply put, the manly man is so strong and manly he has no room for emotions, especially sad ones. Maybe a little bit here and there, but it's not like a man would ever go to therapy.

That's just the problem. According to the CDC, women are extremely more likely to be diagnosed with depression than men.

But how many more men would be diagnosed with depression if they were taught to talk about their feelings and to seek out help like women are taught to? Between the ages of 40-59, on the graph above, we see that there is a 5 percent difference among men and women in the diagnosis of depression. However, in males ages 40-44, there were 2,728 deaths by suicide. In females, there were 854 deaths. This disparity continues throughout the chart, showing that men are far more likely to commit suicide than women.

I think that these two factors are connected. Since men are less likely to be diagnosed with depression by a clinical professional, they are more likely to commit suicide. As a society, we are fine talking about men coming back from war, experiencing PTSD and seeking treatment for that, but when it comes to men seeking help for depression, we're not so supportive. Even the advertising for most antidepressants picture women and not men.

If our society stopped telling men that they can't show their emotions and that they can't talk about their feelings, maybe the suicide rates among men would go down and the diagnosed depression rates would go up. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having depression. There's nothing wrong with going to therapy. We can obviously see that being diagnosed with depression and getting therapy is a prevention of suicide, so why are we telling one group of people that it's not OK for them to get help?