Holmes core thing though is that he has an almost ADHD-esque craving for novelty and tolerance for risk taking. He also can't stand not actively working on things, and when he's not working is when he's depressed. He doesn't seem to know how to actually feel good, but he knows how to be useful, thus his penchant for productivity boosters like cocaine.
He's a great character, but I wouldn't over pathologize him according to today's understanding of mental health. Doyle was a physician and gave Holmes various traits similar to what he had seen in his patients.
> ...when he's not working is when he's depressed.
Holmes, being an exceptionally observant man, definitely would observe that walks raise the mood, allow for (most often silly) ideas to come and, last but not least, increase observation capabilities, attention to details and speed of thought.
Arthur Conan-Doyle did an extensive walks back then, but his hero was written to not to. This is not right.
Just because your logical mind says one thing is good to do and you know you should do it you are not going to always obey your rider, the inertia of the elephant takes over.
So you need a trigger to snap out of it, for Holmes it was a new case.
AFAIR those had a specific purpose (chasing a perp, tracking down evidence, etc.). Most of his thinking he did sitting in a chair and smoking his pipe for hours on end (sometimes the whole night).
(emphasis is mine)
I would argue that still in 2025 this is an extreme and institutionalized taboo.
If we fill up the public discourse with the issues and wants of women and make the issues and wants of men a private matter this will skew the public understanding of the stance of women and men - we see this hardcore these days with boys and men being villainized, made invisible and made suspicious only due to their gender.
From here we have two ways forward: Either make sure that mens issues gain a proportionate part of the public discourse or argue that all issues are a private matter.
It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".
That does not mean we should all be talking to everybody about it all the time. I take stuff into a therapy session I'm not going to discuss anywhere else, because if I started talking about it at work, or even close relationships, I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.
But at the same time, we do need to talk to people about it. And there are some toxic barriers we could do with addressing.
Men are not "meant" to cry or show vulnerability in almost all contexts in almost all cultures. That's sad, because while we don't all want men breaking down in tears when their coffee order isn't quite right, we also know it's healthy for men to acknowledge and process difficult feelings like grief and rejection.
While most people realise it's not OK to tell a woman she'd look prettier if she smiled more, few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident. That causes problems I think we can all call out and name in modern dating culture.
According to some stats I just pulled up for the UK, surveys suggest that more than 75% of men report as having had mental health issues, but only 60% have ever spoken to another human being about it at all, with 40% of men stating it would have to be so bad that they are considering self-harm or suicide to talk to anyone, ever. This is horrible.
So, sure, perhaps we don't need to talk about Freudian analysis down the pub, and nobody at work wants to hear about you reconciling feelings about how you were treated as a child by members of your family, but please:
Most men need to talk to somebody about their mental health. And for many problems, that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.
If you're reading this, and think that might be you, please, for your own sake, go talk to a professional.
You might not gel with the first therapist, counsellor, psychiatrist or psychologist you speak to. That's OK, they won't mind if you say you want to try a few different people. You can find people who will help in your town, on video calls, on apps, all over. Just speak to someone.
I'd like to elaborate on something you touch on briefly:
> I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.
> that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.
I think there's an important line to walk here. I think it's important everyone (men and women) are able to talk about their feelings and experiences with their friends - but I don't think the goal needs to be "helping work it out". Just sharing and listening can be liberating, can help ease the road to talking to a professional, and can help others see that others struggle too.
There is a tendency in conversations of any sort to be always searching for a "solution" or an "answer", instead of just listening.
(There's a lot of nuance here in choosing when to share, etc, but I just wanted to talk a bit about it)
Is that really a thing?
I mean sure there might people doing this, but it is obvious that telling someone they have too little self esteem, that this is a personal and can very well be perceived as an attack (especially by someone with low self esteem).
(Also I think the distinction is a bit weird in general. Isn't confidence sexy in women, too?)
We take it for granted that virtually no one will make it through life without ever sustaining a serious or enduring physical injury. Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
To extend you physical injury analogy: yes, people get physically injured. People break legs, and because of the focus and progress on physical injuries, they wear a cast for a few weeks, and then - for all practical intents and purposes - the injury never happened.
Because the same attention wasn't applied to mental health, I think people realised they were surrounded by the equivalent of people dragging themselves around on the ground because of a broken leg a decade ago that never got fixed. Why would anyone do that? Either because they don't know about the treatment, or because they live in an environment where the idea of getting treatment is seen as a bad or weak or shameful thing.
> Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
Just like we expect to walk down the street and see the occasional person with a plaster or bandage to handle a physical injury, if you accept we all have mental injuries, why do you expect to see them handled any more privately than physical ones?
A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma.
What we want as a society is a democratic process, and it is heavily up for negotiation these years. It is completely fine.
Personally, my core belief is that whatever we ultimately decide on, it counts for all equivalent regardless of their gender.
There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience.
Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default.
As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale.
As a matter of interest, many of the traits were inspired by someone Doyle worked for named Dr. Joseph Bell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell) who emphasised and used careful observation - a skill that can be very useful to a medical practitioner. The relationship between Bell and Doyle was fictionalised into a series called "Murder Rooms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the...
I'm curious to hear how often do you hear it in every day life outside of the internet.
Especially for people working remotely without a family.
There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic.
There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc.
There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc.
It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
I am 100% certain that conservative men being less likely to seek help is _part_ of the reason why various data shows them as having fewer mental health issues than their liberal counterparts. But I doubt that's the whole picture, and it's also by far the least interesting part of the picture - the cause and effect there is pretty simple and clear.
As another commenter in this thread observes, there's "too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc". I think that's part of it as well, and it's not difficult to believe that this is something that impacts "liberal and left leaning men" more than conservatives, due to sheer exposure if nothing else. I think you do a disservice to the discussion if you dismiss this outright.
As written in a sibling thread, I am mostly concerned with the relative visibility of issues as that creates equal opportunity.
The implication of not focusing on men's issues is that we can not focus on women's issues either.
Good luck fighting for that.
Conservatives are less likely to see proffessional help but not help. They simply rely on family which imo has a better incentive structure than therapists.
Anecdotally I've watched a lot of people go down the therapy and medication route over the years. I've noticed they become more unstable as time passes. Maybe that would have happened anyways.
or
Maybe it's because humans weren't designed to spill our guts to strangers and then take prolonged phycoactive drugs to fix mental problems that science does not understand.
I built and released a game called Autism Simulator recently. Online feedback was overwhelmingly positive but with plenty of gaslighting sprinkled in, e.g. "everybody's a bit autistic", "that just sounds like working in tech".
Minimization is always the default go-to for men's mental health issues.
Would you mind linking to the game so I can check it out?
Allowing yourself to be vulnerable means you are indeed open to attack. But it is also a large part of emotional connection. The alternative is being a fortress - with all the relationship problems that entails.
The very fact that you see vulnerability as “bad” is a perfect example of what that language is intended to highlight.
I’m reminded of the concept of siege mentality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_mentality
> In sociology, siege mentality is a shared feeling of victimization and defensiveness—a term derived from the actual experience of military defences of real sieges. It is a collective state of mind in which a group of people believe themselves constantly attacked, oppressed, or isolated in the face of the negative intentions of the rest of the world. Although a group phenomenon, the term describes both the emotions and thoughts of the group as a whole, and as individuals. The result is a state of being overly fearful of surrounding peoples, and an intractably defensive attitude.
> Among the consequences of a siege mentality are black and white thinking, social conformity, and lack of trust, but also a preparedness for the worst and a strong sense of social cohesion.
What about letting people know how you feel and your weaknesses while not caring if someone judges you for it? Is that being vulnerable or not?
Historic ‘stoic male’ personas existed for a reason. Because in many situations, it works. Despite the complaining.
And being less ‘emotionally connected’ is valuable when people use that connection to exploit or hurt you. A very common experience for many men.
That people (especially women) then complain you won’t open up to them is a riot in those situations because it’s like someone complaining you keep putting on your bullet proof vest - while they keep shooting at you.
Historic male mental health issues also resulted. But notably, folks depending on the stoic persona for their own wellbeing would typically throw you under the bus for those issues too.
“How dare you get mad! You’re a dangerous threat!” says the person constantly harassing the person, or the boss putting you in worse and worse work conditions while pretending they are doing you a favor, etc.
They do that, of course, because mad people actually fight back. But if you need the job or are dependent on the relationship…
As many men have experienced, the only way to ‘win’ is shut off caring about what people say on that front - among other emotions.
There's a stoic quote I love:
> our ideal wise man feels his troubles, but overcomes them
- Seneca, Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 9 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
The way I see it, if you never let yourself be vulnerable, you can never fully feel your troubles, and you cannot fully overcome them.
Is this about other people being immature or looking to abuse us? Is this something that generally goes beyond school?
From my experience, the reason you'd risk being vulnerable is there are some things you can't achieve without doing so, it'd be like trying to do surgery with a scalpel on someone wearing platemail, or trying to detect radiation with a Geiger counter behind 20 meters of lead, for some tools to work properly they're required to be in a position where they're 'vulnerable', like eyes.
I think it's sad that performative emotions & vulnerability seem to be a popular thing to have to signal for acceptance. Which in my opinion is worse than nothing as at least when you're not faking something it's easier to agree that you haven't really tried it.
You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not and performative anything is not required for acceptance, but people are not accepting of others who deal with their social interaction in these terms and your very language betrays where you stand. These imaginary requirements for affection are not what's sad here.
I don't think any actor has come as close as Jeremy Brett did.
BBC Sherlock has too little episodes to bring audience along a prolonged struggle with mental health.
As I said downthread.....
In Conan Doyle's books, Holmes was a user of cocaine, not an addict.
This modern desire to portray Holmes as a drug addict says far more about our own times.
"For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug-mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’ ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton, whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life."
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Sherlock_Holmes...
Of course Brett was in fact completely out of it for much of the filming on all sorts of things.
Secondly, the stories that mention coke use are all written from the perspective of Holmes' best friend, who we'd expect to be biased towards writing about his friend in a positive light. I don't think this is accidental. Watson quotes him effectively saying "I just do coke because life is so mundane and boring, and not stimulating enough for me" which is nearly the exact same justification and thought process used by like, every addict and if not a word-for-word quote, then at least very similar for Chris Moltisanti's justification of his own addiction to Tony Soprano.
It may not be an exact rendering of what was in the books but it is extremely natural modification to make, where otherwise we'd have flat Marty Stu character who is talking in ways that seem very consistent with at least problematic use and yet who's not addicted. "Our own times" have dealt with at least 100 years of coke addiction, 50 years of crack so maybe we're just not naive enough to believe that a guy who's saying "my friend just takes it when he's bored, but he's bored all the time because his mind is too sharp for this dull world" isn't a problematic user or addict.
I also agree that the view directly into the state of mind of both Watson and Holmes was refreshing.
I read the stories as an child, and seen various of the film adaptations; Holmes became a meme even within Conan Doyle's lifetime, but I'm sure I'd benefit from going back to the source as an adult.
It’s a tragedy of the commons we are all largely oblivious as a species.
Maybe the only interesting part is that drug use was considered (barely) socially acceptable and holmes was still respectable. Note that he wasn't an alcoholic.
Shout out to the bbc adaptation which does a fantastic and hilarious job of portraying holmes as an erratic drug addict.
Except in Conan Doyle's books, Holmes was a user of cocaine, not an addict.
This desire to portray Holmes as a drug addict says far more about our own times.
He was definitely not holding together his life by any traditional measure.
An Englishman’s proverbial “stiff upper lip” came to be a cliche for a reason.
“Boarding school syndrome” would be the term coined for the emotional damage that was an educational ideal for a long while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_school#Psychological_...
People have a tendency to look at the cruelest warriors of history and think that is success. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Napoleon are not something to emulate. They were successful by causing horrific pain to a lot of people.
The old boys network and class still plays a big role in UK politics. I'm convinced that the behaviour of Boris Johnson and even Starmer is incomprehensible without that unspoken element.
Is it a bad thing? perhaps. Is it a recipe for disaster? I would say the historical evidence is pretty clear that no, not really. It worth pointing out that the US where class is much less important is more successful.
In my head Holmes is descended from minor nobility while Watson is solidly upper middle class.
Now, Labours envy based attacks on the private schools that gave them all their advantages in life helps nobody. It won't matter to rich kids and is just a barrier to success for middle class kids. When you consider the quality of state education, at least there should be some educated people to run the country, even if it's a bad system.
Ot but hogwarts is a great parody of the British boarding school system. A drafty, dangerous castle full of dangerous animals, homicidal, abusive and incompetent teachers, serious injuries are a fact of life and complacent staff. Add in the most incompetent and negligent headmaster in all literature, who hardly does anything throughout the series and thinks that soul sucking demons are an acceptable security measure to protect his students and runs the school as his personal domain. Throw in class based bullying in the student body and you have everything. I always found it striking that the most hatable character in the series is a school inspector (Umbridge).
That Holmes would encounter Sigmund Freud seemed to me at the time as a wild use of artistic license. Since then though I have come to believe that there were a lot fewer people on the Earth in general than I could really appreciate at the time, and some of these luminaries may well have shared a drink together. (So why not a fictional luminary as well?)
He accumulated character flaws along the way, as if Doyle wanted to make Holmes as unsympathetic as he could without changing his core traits.
But Holmes is not "unsympathetic" in any of the stories, so I don't see your theory matching the facts.
> He accumulated character flaws along the way, as if Doyle wanted to make Holmes as unsympathetic as he could
[citation needed]
I don't even see the first part of that assertion fulfilled, and I read the books multiple times.
If there was a pill for that, how many masterpieces like the Sherlock Holmes books would never be made? The products of misery have always been the devil's advocate's best arguments. If Doyle had not sympathized with Holmes' afflictions, he could not have written him. Or if he had written Holmes as a Mary Sue we wouldn't have cared. (Though for some reason it worked for Harry Potter.)
An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.
> An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.
It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.
(Fun fact, you know that "lorem ipsum" text that's used as filler? It's not nonsense Latin, it's from a speech by Cicero where he denounces the stoic ideal of suffering being good for the soul, or at least "pointless" suffering anyway)
It’s an interesting topic, but the paper makes no revelatory statements and provides a very superficial analysis of Doyle’s work. Hell, it doesn’t even provide a single quote from Holmes to illustrate the mental anguish or “battles with drug addiction” which the author claims that he experiences in the books. Holmes’ 7% “solution of cocaine” usage was never presented as rising to the level of addiction in the books, by the way. Nor does the paper delve into the repressive nature of the Victorian society in which these stories were written and released to show us what was so novel about Doyle allegedly tackling these subjects and why he might have had to merely allude to them rather than discussing them frankly.
All in all, this essay is a poor showing and would have earned the author a C at best in high school English for failing to provide adequate supporting evidence for her assertions.
(If you know of better articles on this topic, then please provide links!)
Not to mention that that the character in this particular story is not actually struggling with debt, he simply discovers, somewhat incredibly, whilst researching for a newspaper story, that he can earn far more money begging than in his job as a reporter. There simply is no pressure, he just lacks integrity.
Asked and answered
Where exactly do you observe this?
But it always has been, just less self-important/self-reporting drama (x is getting divorced because they told us!), and more ‘we just found out x celebrity is getting divorced’.
[1] New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men
The flagged thread is flagged, not downvoted. 45 points, 87 comments.
I doubt RAND[1] and IPSOS are in the redpilled subculture, that's quite the reach.
Not everything touching on men's problems in the current age is redpilled
[1] https://www.rand.org/about.html
>The RAND American Life Panel and the Ipsos KnowledgePanel are nationally representative probability-based survey panels of adults in the United States