Suicide: Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington’s last song of silence.

As a clinical psychologist I often bear witness to the intense suffering at times unspeakable that people live with, and am amazed, like Bruce Springsteen, that at the end of every hard earned day (most) people find some reason to believe.

Specialized in working with male survivors of historic sexual abuse, I am acutely aware of the demons Chester Bennington was wrestling with. He is not alone in a long line of male survivors struggling in silence, under the dark cloak of shame, where the possibility of light is eclipsed behind the prescribed suffocating imperatives of masculinity.

To speak of mental illness and depression when discussing the possible causes of suicide is to cloak human distress in an asepticized language that robs individuals from the narrative arc of their lives. To put it bluntly, at most civilized dinner parties and clinical case conferences, it is much more polite and efficient to speak of mental illness and depression than of what it must feel like for “an 8 year old boy to have a cock repeatedly forced in his mouth and up his ass for fear of being beaten or killed. How do you medicate that?” a client once asked me.

The shame that paralyzes survivors of historic sexual abuse into silence also constrains our clinical language to address the real human consequences of abuse. Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative identity disorder, borderline personality disorder, addictive personality disorder, etc., are but a few examples of our tepid attempts at talking around the carnage of the lived experience of most survivors.

As mental health practitioners we have a responsibility to honour, with courage, and courageous words the lived experience of those who place their trust in our hands.

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Jacques Legault, C.Psych

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Psychologist and all things human. https://jacqueslegault.com

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