Brad Pitt And The Effects Of Divorce On Men's Mental Health

What All Men Can Learn From Brad Pitt's Divorce

One of the world’s luckiest men has finally come unstuck – does that help the rest of us?

Throughout his career, Brad Pitt has been many things: the leading man who reinvented the detective noir in Seven; the chiselled physique who inspired countless lean gym regimes after Fight Club; the gilded playboy who cut a swathe through Hollywood mixing work and play with his glamorous wife and their huge family. There was also the time that he inexplicably dropped an eye-watering Jamaican accent in Meet Joe Black, but nobody likes to dwell on that.

However, the figure that emerges from a long interview in this month’s GQ Style is a very different one. After a public – and apparently acrimonious – breakup with Angelina Jolie, Pitt comes across as a man who has behaved badly, is only acknowledging it after losing most of what he had, and is now licking his wounds and readjusting to what life looks like when the things that you assumed would be around until you die are suddenly no longer there. Or, as the piece describes him, “a 53-year-old human father/former husband smack in the middle of an unravelled life, figuring out how to mend it back together.”

Throughout the interview, details emerge reinforcing this impression – he’s lost weight, he’s given up drinking, he’s rattling around a big former family-filled home with a farting bulldog for company (and talking to the dog like it’s a person), he’s spending a lot of time staying with friends, taking up new hobbies (sculpture) and building big fires in the morning and the evening.

It’s easy to be sneery about Pitt’s predicament, and some responses have clearly taken pleasure in the idea of a guy who frankly seemed to have rather glided through life finally being taken down a peg or two. But his predicament is far from unique. Particularly relevant is Pitt’s age (52): a Samaritans report in 2012, Men, Suicide and Society, drew attention to men of this age and the emotional risks they ran: in short, the report identified them as a “buffer generation”, caught between the stereotypical demands of their fathers’ era (strong and silent, independent, a breadwinner) and a radically transformed modern world which made meeting these demands impossible.

This was the generation which first had to try and negotiate what married life would look like in this new landscape, and often failed to work it out (the divorce rate rocketed from the late 1970s onwards and only dropped off in the mid-2000s). The Samaritans report claimed that while this was bad for everyone involved, it hit the men particularly hard: “Men in mid-life are dependent primarily on female partners for emotional support,” with women generally being better at maintaining close friendships in their thirties outside of their marriage that they can fall back on.

Too many men hit early middle age, lose their main emotional crutch, and have nobody to turn to. As a result, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts are three times higher among divorced men than their married counterparts.

“The investment of time and emotions that is necessary to maintain a long term relationship can be enormous and conversely, the devastation of splitting from that same relationship can be incredibly sad and enraging and devastating all at the same time,” says Aubrey St Louis, a person-centred therapist based in West London. “The ego can take a severe bruising when a divorce takes place – it would be nice to hear that the primary concern is the children or the amicable division of property etc. But in that moment of realisation that your life partner is now nothing of the such, the pain felt can quickly become rage and anger.”

Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith

He highlights how damaging this can be for men, who in lieu of “acceptable” ways of expressing pain are more likely to turn to the use of drugs or alcohol as a way of sedating their emotions. “I believe that these feelings are so powerful, because for a lot of men they have not felt scared, hurt, or vulnerable to this level since they were young boys. The challenge is how they manage these deep feelings as adults, with the expectations that society (and themselves) put them under.”

St Louis stresses the value of therapy, even for men who don’t think it’s their kind of thing – “a space where men can explore the pain and anger and hurt”, and develop a relationship with a therapist they trust, who can stand alongside them as they go through a difficult period.

Ultimately, he suggests, whatever your status, the aftermath of a divorce is largely about the problems of identity and how yours has suddenly shifted: “You are no longer a husband and father. You have become an ‘ex’ and maybe a part-time dad. The perception of your new role and how others may view or judge you can be detrimental to your self esteem. Have you lost some social cache or been ‘downgraded’ as you no longer have a wife? Have you failed as a husband or father? Are you a ‘real man’? The self judgement can often be more painful than the external judgement.

“Imagine, then, going through this when you are one of the world’s most recognised celebrities. But the true benefit with someone like Pitt’s story is for people to realise that we are all human and fundamentally have the same problems. There is no exemption from life’s problems based on our net worth.”

Aubrey St Louis is based at counsellinginbrentford.com. General information about mental health is available at www.thecalmzone.net.