The suicide of a therapist/gay self-help guru

[Calvin]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 12:45pm

And he had a book coming out about how to cope with life as a gay man over 40.


The Life and Death of the Therapist Bob Bergeron Updated On: 4/2/12 at 12:45 PM

[TheatreDiva90016]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 1:19pm

That is the saddest thing I could have read first thing on a Monday morning.
And the last line of he article felt like a punch in the gut.

I wish his family all of the best and hope he has found peace.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 1:37pm

I have been obsessed about this for two days. For the life of me, I can not figure out what Times writer Jacob Bernstein was going for when he would write the following paragraph:

But there is something particularly resonant about Mr. Bergeron’s tale. Here was a man who ended his life at the exact moment he seemed to be nearing a professional peak, one that involved the upbeat story of a mature gay man facing the second half of his life with enthusiasm, hope and an endless array of tight T-shirts.

I just. What? The point of this article is what, exactly?

I've also dug into the dead man's website and tried to get through his videos. I am appalled by the opinions he held about aging and I am appalled that he tried to make a living selling solutions to a problem he perpetuated.

As I said, obsessed.

[Calvin]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 1:44pm

Namo, did you see his long piece about how important it is to remain a "sex symbol" as you got older, backdropped by a long disscussion of when it's appropriate for an older man to take off his shirt in public? Such a thorough parsing of the topic -- almost to a neurotic degree.

I say that not to be cruel or insensitive, but when you put so much of your self-worth into how sexually appealing you are to others...well, that's always going to be a deflating currency, I'm afraid.




this was the piece Updated On: 4/2/12 at 01:44 PM

[Unknown User]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 1:57pm

I turned 50 last month and I look MUCH better than this guy ever did.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 2:03pm

His is a horrifying cautionary tale. He claimed to want to help gay men dealing with aging issues, but he perpetuated all the lies that make many gay men feel like crap about getting older. And he seemed to have NO experience outside of his own bubble, so it never seemed to occur to him when he said, "We gay men take our shirts off, it's what we do," that he was talking about a very specific subset of a very specific niche of a very specific type of metropolitan community.

HIS experience was how it is for all gay men. In one of his lecture videos he lamented how there were no role models for gay men and aging because the ENTIRE generation who would have modeled that for us died of AIDS, so poor us, we had to make it up as we go along. This is of course, not true, in either respect, had he opened his eyes he could have found plenty of older gay people who have lead long and happy lives. But he was too busy living in his own anxiety, generalizing it out to all gay men, feeding into the anxiety of those gay men, and then offering them a cure for it. He also might have noted that there were plenty of gay men getting older and forging their own paths with health and happiness and fulfilling sex lives.

But no. He was too busy concocting schemes like, "65 is actually the beginning of old age, so I still have 17 years of being young and THAT is something I can wrap my brain around."

Oh. Mary.

Updated On: 4/2/12 at 02:03 PM

[Unknown User]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 2:14pm

That article WAS a parody of a New York Times article, right?

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 2:25pm

I guess those of us who never had beauty to lose really are the lucky ones!

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 2:36pm

Calvin and Namo--I saw that article on his blog and was similarly horrified.

This is a sad article, a sad situation, but what is also sad--or bewildering--is the attitude of the NY Times writer and the fact that the Times put this article in their "Fashion & Style" section.

Because everything about the gays is fashion and style to the people at the NY Times--including when the gays commit suicide! (And do stylishly!)

I am sorry for his friends and his family and his patients. I hope they get deeper insight into why life is worth living than he obviously was able to give himself.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 2:52pm

I was going to start a thread about this yesterday until my mind buckled under the horror of it. I'm glad Calvin did, because I would have titled it, "The 'Times' As It Knows Us" but it would have been too fraught.

Jacob Bernstein is Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein's gay son, no?

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 3:18pm

Hoo lord, I just watched the one that Calvin linked.

I think it's sad that he killed himself, but I don't relate to anything about him at all.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 4:03pm

I just reread the text at that link. He clearly spent a lot of time contemplating the shirtlessness issue. In other words, he expended considerable brain power on nothing.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 4:14pm

It's what keeps us sex objects!

[SNAFU]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 4:29pm

Wow…. Just read and watched the article on taking your shirt off. His suicide comes as no surprize after watching that.

Superficiality practiced as a religion.

Updated On: 4/2/12 at 04:29 PM

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 4:55pm

Here, they say, was a guy with seemingly everything to live for: good looks, a condo in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, semi-annual trips to Europe, parents who adored him and absolutely no history of clinical depression.

Another example of how looks, money, status and material possessions does NOT, repeat DOES NOT buy you happiness.

At the risk of sounding corny happiness comes from WITHIN...regardless of what you do or don't have. The rest just enhances what is already THERE.

I learned this lesson A LONG TIME AGO.

I have friends who make 6 times what I make a year and to outsiders seemingly have it all....and yet they are miserable.

SUICIDE however is NOT the solution.

Updated On: 4/2/12 at 04:55 PM

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:05pm

When I was in my 20s (and living in NYC), I never understood the shirtless mentality amongst gay men.

About 10 years ago a friend of mine visited me in DC from Boston. He was in his late 40s at the time. While he was here we went out to a club. The minute we walked in, he took off his shirt. I gave him a look like, "Really??!" I have always found any of the "ooh look at me" attitude as so unnecessary. It just made me roll my eyes.

After reading the article and looking at the videos of Mr. Bergeron, I wonder how many clients bought into that mentality since he was dishing it out.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:05pm

I think the reason it has been bugging me so much is I can't believe somebody could get to be in his late-40s without already knowing what you're saying, CA.

The article left me wondering a lot of things about the particulars of his life. The writer of the article used that weird flippant tone, and in another section described Bergeron's "thriving" therapy practice. I would like a definition of "thriving."

How big was his client load? There isn't a ton of therapy money out there for fee for service types. His workshops appeared to be more like lectures to drive up business for the book and therapy practice, straight out of a "marketing yourself 101" course at an adult education place. People really do have to do a lot of hustling when running their own practices, and to me it looks as if he thought he was uncovering a niche market that nobody had paid attention to, when, in fact, there are a lot of people working on gay aging issues.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:11pm

I'm curious about the hook-ups who became his clients.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:17pm

I think Freud would call that "premature transference."

[Scripps2]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:22pm

"I'm curious about the hook-ups who became his clients"

That does seem to be rather careless.

Not quite the same thing but I have a friend who is a professional sex-therapist - one of the few in the UK who are NHS registered - he refers to other sex therapists who end up having sex with their clients as "prostitutes". He usually ends up having to sort out the resulting mess. And he's very careful to keep his personal and professional lives separate.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/2/12 at 5:51pm

I have absolutely nothing against prostitutes. I have nothing against competent therapists. I understand how challenging it can be to work within the very community one socializes in. But a competent therapist would not accept somebody he had hooked up with as a client, even if the sexual relationship was in the past, which I thought the article suggested.

If this was just a guy who didn't believe the happy horsecrap he was pedaling, he wouldn't be the first charlatan in history. However, I get ticked off when I think about the damage he might have done to anybody without the analytical tools to see through it, who might have tried to feel better about himself while following Bob Bergeron into his mind-game maze. Can you imagine thinking you have to do mental calculus to figure out the age demographic of a crowd to understand if it's "appropriate" to take off your shirt or not?

[Jane2]

Posted: 4/3/12 at 1:39am

He was a practicing psychotherapist, no? Isn't at least a PhD necessary for that? He was referred to several times in the article as Mr. Bergeron. Not doctor. That had me confused.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/3/12 at 6:55am

No, Jane. You can be an MSW and not a PhD.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/3/12 at 9:52am

He was a licensed clinical social worker. He's required to have clinical supervision of his own to deal with his professional and personal issues.

[tazber]

Posted: 4/3/12 at 10:02am

^^^^^
I did not know that.

Hopefully his patients will be able to keep whatever help he provided them and not see this an invalidation of everything he preached.