Spokane’s KXLY Channel 4 (an ABC affiliate) produced a video series dedicated to raising awareness about boys’ mental health and helping parents of sons. The Saving Our Sons series aired last year.
This year, with their news segment “New legislation targets troubling male trends“, KXLY Channel 4 called attention to the legislative effort to establish a Washington State Commission on Boys and Men via House Bill 1270.
The Saving Our Sons series features an interview with Dr. Michael Gurian of the Gurian Institute. It also features Mike and Kimber Erickson of the Kellen CARES Foundation. Their son Kellen Erickson, a graduate of Ferris High School in Spokane, died by suicide at age 19.
The full Saving Our Sons series is on YouTube.
See our related article: Washington State University and Hilinski’s Hope Foundation support mental health of student-athletes
Gurian: We’re not helping our boys become men
Below is a partial transcript of one of the videos in KXLY’s Saving Our Sons series.
It’s been called the silent crisis and an epidemic: the rate of depression and suicide in our boys and young men. This week on 4 News Now we’ve been looking into why it’s happening and what we can do to help.
In tonight’s Saving Our Sons special report, Robyn Nance sat down with gender expert Dr. Michael Gurian of Spokane, who has written 32 books including one titled Saving Our Sons.
“I would definitely agree with the Surgeon General and the CDC. I think it is a mental health epidemic,” Gurian said.
Dr. Gurian has studied male and female behaviors, dynamics, and brains for decades. Some of the biggest issues he is seeing with mental health issues in our boys and young men center around changes in the environment, society, and nurturing.
“The way we treat males now, we just don’t really support boys in growing up to become men,” said Gurian.
Over the years, he’s seen a shift in parenting and the way boys are treated in schools. The trend has been to make boys more like girls, even referring to them as “defective girls.”
“We’d like them to be more like girls in the way they talk, the way they emote, the way they act in school,” Gurian said.
Boys are disciplined more. They are repressed. That turns into frustration and can lead to inner struggles.
“So of course we have many problems: depression, anxiety, a lot of violence. It’s been building for many decades.”
What can parents do?
There are things parents, teachers, and anyone in child development can do to help change the course for our boys. Dr. Gurian will give some real-life tools at the Helping Boys Thrive Summit this Saturday. If you are worried about your son’s mental health right now, he says there are three things you can do.
- Get screen time down to an appropriate limit for their age and development. “A lot of the anxiety and depression that we’re seeing in our teens now is connected, at least in part, to screens and to the way dopamine is being affected in the brain,” Gurian said.
- Watch for social isolation. Are they staying in their room? Not participating in usual activity? Losing friends?
- Seek the right kind of help. “When you see that your child is having trouble, interview the counselors who could work with him, just like you’d interview a school, to see if they understand males. Does the counselor work with adolescent boys?” said Gurian.
These points are just scratching the surface of how we can help boys and young men.
See our related piece: James Donaldson, former Seattle SuperSonic, opens up about depression and having considered ‘suicide by cop’ [Video]