This is why Jason wanted to appear in a new film about masculinity, Me and My Penis, which is airing on August 31 at 10pm on Channel 4. And it seems no man is immune from mental health issues. Suicide remains the most common cause of death for men aged 20-49 in the UK. “I did get to the point where I gave up on myself,” he says. What would he have done with all that bottled up pain and grief, had the strong, silent macho stereotype prevailed? It was only when he joined the Donor Conception Network, a support network for families with children conceived with donated sperm, eggs or embryos, and started counselling, that the depression gradually lifted. That’s the level of guilt you feel.” She refused. “I said, ‘Just go, just leave,’ because she could go and be with another guy and have everything she wanted. I knew I hadn’t really, but I still felt it.”
There’s that idea of spreading your seed. “I had one job and that was to get my wife pregnant and I couldn’t do that. “I wouldn’t speak to him for a long time,” says Jason.ĭid he feel less of a ‘man’ as a result of the diagnosis? “I always think of the lion and the pride, who will impregnate all the lionesses to further his line. One of his friends even made an ill-timed joke at the pub, about a ridiculously virile snail who climbed to the top of a tree in the Amazon jungle to impregnate all the female snails.
“At the time I had a partnership with an agency in Glasgow and there were a lot of blokes there and one of them said to me: ‘You shouldn’t really talk about this stuff’.” Other men seemed uncomfortable when he tried to discuss the infertility tests. “I’m generally a happy, upbeat guy, but when I found out I was infertile, it sent me into a spiral of depression. It was grief, ultimately, but I didn’t realise it was grief because how can you grieve for something that doesn’t exist? “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I know what it’s like to lose a child you’ve never had.
When entrepreneur Jason, 44, was first diagnosed with infertility ten years ago, the pain was indescribable.
0 kommentar(er)
