The purpose of the next 500-600 words is straightforward – to answer a simple question, “What stops men from seeking help for their mental struggles?” Throughout the article, I plan on taking you on a journey backed by statistics and research on the struggles that men face when it comes to help seeking, what we keep getting wrong about men’s mental health and what can be collectively done to make life easier for the men in our lives.
1. Why focus on men’s mental health?
Before reading the article, you might have a simple query. Why is it so necessary to talk about men’s mental health specifically? Does mental health not belong to everyone? Why then must we focus on a strata which seems to enjoy the most social capital in societies across the world?
Reality is often more complex than what narratives on media channels would have us believe. In almost every country in the world, men die by suicide at higher rates than women. The disparity spans from a ratio of 2:1 (2 deaths by suicide in men for every 1 suicide in women) to 4:1. In 2022, 72% of suicides that happened in India were by men.
It would be naive to suggest that we can simply ignore men’s mental health in the face of such numbers. Sure, not everyone who dies by suicide does so purely due to poor mental health, but quite a lot of people do, and such people often end up being men. There has to be some way these lives can be saved.
That’s what we try to understand when we talk about men’s mental health.
2. Why don’t men seek help then?
A fair question to ask then is why don’t men seek help? If they face so many problems, why aren’t they visiting medical and mental health professionals more often? The answer to this is quite complicated. While conducting a study on suicide prevention in Switzerland, Angst and Ernst (1990) made a somber but succinct observation “Women seek help – men die”.
This is not limited to just issues with mental health. The same trend of delayed seeking of help has been observed in physical ailments like diabetes, muscular injuries, sprains and infections as well. The way we raise boys, they are expected to remain self-sufficient and seeking help or assistance is looked down upon as a sign of ‘weakness’ or ‘lack of competence’. Both the judgements can be quite harmful for the masculine identity that every man wishes to protect about themselves. And so, in an effort to maintain their identity, their own idea of masculinity, help seeking is delayed. Help which is often quite necessary
3. Breaking the silence: Not as easy as it sounds.
In recent times, conversations on men’s mental health have slowly started becoming a part of the popular discourse. Unfortunately, I find these conversations quite superficial. Most of the conversations start and end with “Speak Up”/”Talk it out”/”It’s okay to cry” or variants thereof.
These slogans turn a blind eye to the very real social influences that prevent men from speaking up and instead place the burden of “talking” on the men themselves. Men struggle to open up because most of us have been socialized over 15-20 years of our life to speak up about emotions as little as possible. This socialization cannot be overcome in the space of 2 hours, 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years.
4. What can be done in that case?
It’s important to keep our eyes open to behavior based modes of communication that men often end up using to express themselves. While an emotion may not necessarily be verbalized, it might come out in the form of a behavior that emulates the emotion. Sadness may come out as a sad story on social media. Happiness may come out in the form of jumping around like a bunny. Anger may come out in destructive ways which hurt the person and those around them.
Behavior-based communication of emotion leads to challenges of its own and as suggested above, can lead to harm to the person and those around them. It is exactly for this reason that a healthy relationship requires two people to be willing to change and improve themselves in order to develop deeper bonds. It’s not easy for a man to ‘speak up’ but one must try. It’s not easy for someone trying to care for a man to understand non-verbal cues, but one must try.
Men’s mental health is one of the most important challenges facing our society today. The best part is – we can all work on it. We all have a role to play. Understanding a man better is a step towards improving men’s mental health.
Are you willing to take that step today?
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