Putting the Men in Mental Health

By: Camden Baucke, MS, LLP

Mental health is important, but men are less likely to seek support or acknowledge their emotions—and it has serious consequences.

In 2021, the WHO reported that suicides rates for men in high-income countries is three times higher than that of women. Also in 2021, the NIMH found that 6.2% of adult men experience depression, with adult women at 10.3%. In 2022, SAMHSA found that almost a fifth of all adult men experienced some form of mental illness that year, roughly coming out to 24.6 million men.

Men’s mental health is not a trend, it’s a growing crisis.

Its momentum cannot be stopped unless the stigma ends—the belief that emotions make you weak or somehow less masculine.

Depression, anxiety, and stress are not signs of worthlessness, they are human experiences. Experiences that, if appropriately managed, can save lives and improve them.

In this article, I will tell you how stigma affects men’s mental health, including foundational steps to understand emotions as well as manage them.

What is Men’s Mental Health?

Men’s mental health is simply a science—psychological, biological, emotional, and social well-being. This includes relationships, work, trauma, stress, and more. What makes men’s mental health unique are (1) common struggles (2) methods of managing internal experiences, and (3) patterns of seeking support.

These 3 factors play a key part in the rising men’s mental health crisis.

How Stigma Affects Men’s Mental Health

The ultimate goal for men’s mental health is successfully managing emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. We often call this coping.

However, men cannot cope with common struggles if they ignore their pain. You can’t manage emotions you neglect.

There’s no incentive to develop methods of managing emotions if you don’t believe you should feel them.

Neglected emotions accumulate over time, degrading physical health. Tearing down cardiovascular and immune systems, leading to outbursts of panic, deep depression, or rage.

Still, even in the flood of unavoidable distress, men may restrain themselves from seeking help because of what it would mean—purely due to stigma.

What is Stigma?

In Greek and Latin, stigma refers to a mark, brand, or tattoo, historically associated with criminals or social outcasts, to designate a meaning of disgrace.

Today, stigma is essentially the same belief that the presence of a certain mark is disgraceful—that mark is any semblance of issues with mental health.

For men, just acknowledging emotions or showing them can be marked as a sign of disgrace.

However, branding mental issues as disgraceful is an inaccurate and self-sabotaging belief.

It’s a belief, not a fact, because it is claimed as true—not proven. On the contrary, there’s more evidence that men who manage their mental health are healthier and happier than those who don’t.

Stigma is a lie. It promises disgrace for the slightest hint of something that is natural and worth addressing without judgment.

You Can’t Escape Mental Health

Stigma against men’s mental health only causes existing problems to fester.

Again, you can’t manage your emotions if you pretend they don’t exist. Do not mistake denial for control.

Anger, anxiety, depression? The body has chemicals, neurons, and hormones that correspond with each.

Fear, grief, and desperation? The mind has constructs responsible for each, grounded in cellular regions in the brain. Mental health is ingrained in the brain and body. There’s no escaping it, no matter how hard you try.

Many young men are flocking to modern concepts of stoicism, which is often used as a rationalized form of self-neglect. True stoicism, in the historical sense, is controlling how you react to emotions and impulses that you recognize, not deny.

Your anatomy is meant for emotions. If you ignore your inescapable being to avoid stigma, you neglect your humanity to appease a lie.

The truth is that emotions are representations of information.

Emotions are Information

What you feel is more than just a pulse in your chest, it’s information.

If you’re deep in the dark woods and notice a glaring pair of eyes, your heart beats hard and your blood pumps fast. Your emotion of terror is telling you that something dangerous is lurking, and your body is giving you the energy to run away to safety. In truly dangerous situations, the emotion of terror and anxiety can keep you safe.

However, not all emotional information is the same.

If you have clinical anxiety, your mind may have blended a true threat and a false threat together into a single concept. Then, the information you receive, in the form of anxious feeling, is not information accurate to the current situation. That’s when you have to do the mental equivalent of swimming up stream and behave in spite of that information.

Let’s say you feel grief after losing someone special. That information is telling you that you loved that person, and now they’re gone. It doesn’t call out for an action as much as it calls out for release. To process the hurt and allow the pain of loss to wash over you.

Feeling emotion doesn’t mean you have to act on it. Sometimes it helps, but sometimes it doesn’t. The only way to tell the difference is to listen to it. It’s like building a home. You need to identify your materials, choose which ones would fit best, and build what you need.

If you acknowledge the emotions you feel, you receive their information. With that information, you simply determine what’s the next best thing to do.

1 – Admit Struggles Without Succumbing to Them

Acknowledging the difficulty of a challenge is not the same as whining about being its victim.

However, there is a prevailing stigma, especially among men, that any expression of difficulty is a sign of weakness.

This is false.

You can voice how difficult a challenge is without succumbing to it. In fact, if you share it with others, you might find common ground with shared struggles. If you come to recognize the prevalence of shared struggles, you may be less willing to pin your struggle on yourself, and more so on the nature of the challenge.

Then, it’s not a useless and self-destructive fight between you and yourself—it’s simply a one way fight between you and your challenges, something you can support and overcome.

2 – No Strength Without Self-Care

Even the most successful people need maintenance.

If you neglect your negative emotions due to stigma, you are more likely to ignore your needs, fail to meet them, and suffer the consequences.

You can exercise constantly, but if you don’t hydrate, stretch, and maintain mobility, you will tear or break something and be out of commission even longer, potentially limiting your ability for the rest of your life.

You can work tirelessly, but if you leave no room for sleep, your concentration will diminish, your work will get sloppier and lose its quality.

Think of yourself like a family vehicle—you can’t take yourself or your family into a better future if you ignore a flat tire or an overdue oil change. If you care about getting where you want to go, take care of yourself. Maintain your mind and your body. Use coping skills, mindfulness, anything to help you sustain your efforts over time.

Rest and recovery is not weakness, lack of character, or absence of willpower—it’s simply the science that can make you more effective than without it.

3 – The Power of Seeking Help

Seeking help is not a sign of weakness. Humanity adapted to the need for relationships millennia before anyone thought they had to do it on their own.

Accepting the help of a friend or mental health professional is not disgraceful or indicative of a defective personality.

If you break your arm, you see a surgeon.

If your athletic techniques need refinement, you hire a coach.

If your knee is recovering from surgery, you meet with a physical therapist.

Loneliness is not impressive. It is a vulnerability.

Ignoring your mental health to boost prestige is a fantasy. Seeing a therapist who can help you become more mentally healthy than ever before is a reality more men need to invest in.

Final Thoughts

If you feel bad, you’re not a problem in need of fixing or hiding.

Men are human, with depth and feelings are an integral part of healthy living.

Emotions are information to accept, acknowledge, listen to, and manage.

If you can do this, you might not be the only person to benefit from it. It can strengthen relationships, reinforce your work ethic, and model healthy emotion management for those who matter most.